Pay Per Click Advertising in Plain English

Perry Marshall, in his Guide to Google AdWords, says this about PPC advertising:


"[It] is about getting in front of people who are looking for what you sell right this moment and get them to respond."



You have the ability to reach your target market instantly, and get them to make a
decision on your product/service.And that's not just it.

It takes just 10 minutes for you to set up an ad campaign in Google AdWords - and
immediately after your ad is ready, it will start bringing in traffic to your websites. No matter
what you're selling, you haveachance, in 10 minutes, to start making sales.

What other advertising platform let's you make a sale that fast?

Better question: how can YOU use this speed (of getting an idea to the market and testing
it almost instantly) to your advantage?

The biggest advantage of PPC advertising is that you can test new business ideas quickly
and cheaply by running an ad campaign for a few hours and monitoring its results. This
alone can save you thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in advertising and
product creation - but only if you do it right (I'll show youhowto in the next 6 chapters).

Pay-per-click advertising operates on two simple premises:

• You pay only for visitors that come to your site (no upfront costs - every "click" while 
• being an expense is also a chance for you to convert that visitor into a customer).
• You pay a certain amount "per click" on your ad. If nobody clicks on your ad, you
• don't pay a dime... and also get no visitors. The goal is to get many TARGETED 
visitors, while paying as little as possible per click.
• Your ads are displayed in the search engines according to what people are searching / looking for. (i.e. If someone search for "weight loss" and you're bidding on the term "weight loss", your ad will be displayed when someone searches for that phrase.)

There are two major PPC ad engines:

1. Google Adwords
2. Yahoo Search Marketing(formerly Overture).

While they are both very effective in pulling in traffic, I exclusively use Google AdWords
(and I'll explain why in just a minute).


Having said that, I don't discourage you from using YSM. In certain niche markets the YSM
network is still not hyper-saturated (unlike AdWords, where the competition is higher) and
you may be able to realize serious short-term gains if you play the PPC game right.

What I would discourage you from is to using a PPC ad network other than AdWords or
YSM. Beyond these two the situation is pretty bleak with poor traffic quality, click fraud and
lack of a sizeable user base all contributing to an abject failure.