Pay Per Click promotion is also known as PPC. With PPC marketing, you pay the search engines every time a person clicks the link in your listing and goes to your website.

Face the facts, it will probably take between 6 and 12 months to avoid being intentionally filtered out of the organic listings by Google. And after that, you'll still have to wait until your site begins to rank high enough in the search engine results to start receiving mouse clicks and traffic. So in the mean time you can get your ad listed at the top of the SE pages by employing PPC marketing

Similar to a lot of other aspects of Internet promotion, keyword research is an important part of PPC marketing. You must know which keywords and keyword phrases the majority of people are using to seek out what it is that you are trying to sell.

When you start a PPC marketing campaign, you are actually involving yourself in an auction. You and your competitors will bid on the keywords and keyword phrases that are used the majority of the time, with the highest listings going to the people who bid the most money. The more that a website is willing to pay for the clicks, the higher that website will be listed in the paid listings, which are most often found at the very top of the page and down the right side of the page.

PPC marketing has become highly cutthroat for many of the popular keywords, which can sell for anywhere from five cents per click to many, many dollars.

PPC marketing is often filled with falsified clicks. Your competition will click on your ads to drive up your PPC marketing bill in order to try to get you to stop advertising and competing. There have also been some lawsuits regarding fraud that is perpetrated by the search engine companies themselves. And the Plaintiffs won at least one of these lawsuits that I read about.

I could write a lot about this area of promotion. But I think that your interests would be better served if I just "cut to the chase." Conversion rates vary widely by industry on the Internet. But the average is similar to what is experienced in the mail-order business, which is between one half of one percent, and two percent. And in the real world, projecting a one percent conversion rate would be fairly safe, though there are thousands of unkonwn factors that can make the one percent number way too high.

What that means is that out of every 100 clicks on your links, you might get one actual sale. So if the markup (Gross Profit) on your average sale is $50.00, and your clicks cost fifty cents each, you can't afford PPC marketing because 100 clicks X .50 per click = $50.00 and you just broke even.

Remember, "Gross Profit" doesn't include your overhead. It is only the difference between the selling price of your item and the cost of your item. So in the example given there was in reality a loss of money. You must know what it costs you to be in business, and that includes how much it costs to own your equipment, pay your rent, ISP, etc., plus the value of your time.

The bottom line is that most PPC has been bid up too high by the bigger businesses and it is difficult or impossible for a little guy to make money using PPC marketing.

Beware of the companies who will offer to handle your PPC marketing for a fee because they can't change the laws of math or physics. They will claim that they have the proficiency to help you succeed, and they may very well. But they still can't change the laws of math or physics.

I've found that PPC marketing can work, but you must cautiously do the math. Can you make a reasonable profit based on the above calculations if you pay the current bid price for the keywords and get only about a 1/10th of 1% or 2/10ths of 1% conversion rate (sales rate)? If you can, then PPC marketing may very well work in your case.

I recommend that you stick with niche terms that haven't been bid up to high. Personally, in my industry I'm only willing to pay between 15 cents and 40 cents maximum per click, and my products sell for between $40.00 and $150.00.

Pay per click? Do the math first, and then make a decision. But you should be willing to lose money while you find out how to make it work!

Personally, I've found several search engine optimization methods that are much more efficient than PPC marketing. These other methods have helped me to promote my website to the first page on the major search engines for the most popular keyword phrases in my industry. One of the reasons that these other techniques are much more productive is they cost little or no money. And most people attribute a lot more reliability to ecommerce sites that rank high in the organic listings vs the sponsored listings.

By using these techniques, in well under one year, I've been able to make my site rank better than other websites in my industry that have been promoting themselves for ten years or more!

In the longer term, you will want to optimize your site and work on getting backlinks to raise your ranking in the organic listings. Many people use reciprocal linking to promote their website.

However, one-way backlinks are much more effective at raising your standings in the organic listings. I have been very successful at getting one-way backlinks and I've documented the steps that were taken to drive lots of free traffic to my site to make it successful by using article spinning and marketing.