PPC or Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing is a way to market a website where the owner of the site pays money to the search engine that brings visitors to their site. It is also known as CPC or Cost Per Click Marketing. Needless to say the owner pays for every single click.

Pay per click is a very fast way of generating traffic to a site. You register with a search engine, write an ad and select some keywords that are associated with the ad. That’s it – within minutes you may start seeing traffic to your site.

Well its not so simple as it sounds! The problem is pay per click has evolved into a huge market and “buying” traffic for popular keywords is getting unaffordable day by day. I am talking about the business generating keywords.

Just to give you an example. If you are a realtor you may want to buy traffic for the keyword “real estate”. I am sure this will cost you about 2 dollars per click or even more in major search engines like Google and Yahoo. How many business people can afford that?

Important Note: There are many smaller PPC search engines. They may be cheaper. Don’t ever try your luck with them. Most of them send junk or robot generated traffic and you will loose your hard earned money. This is known as “click fraud” and requires another post.

Don’t make a gloomy face. Though the PPC is costly, there are ways to get traffic at a reasonable cost.

You must have heard about long tail keywords. A long tail keyword is a set of keywords or keyphrases which are actually long. For example “pay per click marketing service in Washington area” or “find a home under $25000”.

As you can see the long tail keywords are very specific searches and may produce high conversion rates. The only problem with long tail keywords is their volume is low. But long tails come at a much lower cost than primary keywords. So if you have just started a PPC campaign and are not a very rich person, I recommend using long tail keywords to start your PPC campaign.

Another way to reduce the price you pay per click is making sure your ad gets above average clicks than others that are competing with your ad. If your ad gets more clicks than others that are displayed along with your ad, the search engines will think your ad to be of “higher quality” and so will reduce the price you pay per click. Higher your click through rate (CTR) lower the price you pay per click. Please don’t click your own ads, the search engines have ways to know it and may not include your clicks in the CTR algorithm. Worse you may end up paying for your own clicks.

You should also make sure your landing page satisfies the need of the visitor. Search engines now days take into account the quality of the landing page too. The better the quality of the landing page, the lesser you pay.

Always keep a check on your ROI (Return on Investment). If you are not making any profit, it’s advisable to pause your PPC campaign.

If you keep these things in mind, I am sure you will have a profitable PPC campaign.