One easy way to increase the visibility of a product or service is to advertise with a pay per click campaign. Pay per click advertising is easy and effective at increasing the number of visitors on your site and converting them into paying customers. Essentially all pay per click advertising involves is placing heavily targeted ads using Google, Yahoo or MSN. The amount advertisers pay for these ads depends on the popularity of the keywords used and how prominent the ad will be.

How to Begin a Pay Per Click Ad Campaign

The first thing to do when starting a pay per click advertising campaign is to devise a very specific keyword list. Free keyword tools are available to help you get started. Put in your main topic and it will spit out a list of 50 or more relevant keywords to choose from. Carefully go through the list and take out any that are not a good fit for your products.

Next, focus on creating a separate landing page for visitors being routed to your site from pay per click ads. Only interested visitors will click through to see what you have to offer. You will be paying for each of these clicks, so make them count. Give potential customers what they want upfront. Share information on the niche topic, offer a free e-book, lure them in with free advice and quality content, or offer a free sample of your product.

The last step is to sign up with an advertising program like those offered by Google, Yahoo or MSN. Each has their own program that is easy to sign up for. Adwords, for example, is Googles pay per click advertising program. Google assigns a quality score to the keywords used to determine the placement of the ads.

Pay Per Click Pitfalls to Avoid

Despite the fact that pay per click advertising is a simple way to market your business on the Internet, there are some things you can learn from and pitfalls to avoid. The first thing to watch out for is blowing your budget. You pay a certain amount every time someone clicks on your ad, versus paying a set amount for an ad to run no matter how many people look at it. This idea may seem cost effective, but it can also get pricey. The amount you pay is also dependent on where the ad is placed. Top ads cost more per click. You may end up paying $3 per click. This can add up fast; before you know it you could be spending $300 per day for your 100 people to click through to your ad.

Another common mistake for pay per click advertisers is directing traffic to the homepage of your website. Potential clients are interested in very specific information. Give them what they want up front. It is best to send visitors to a conversion page. This turns visitors into paying customers by showing them what you have to offer and calling them to action. Conversion pages yield better results as far as leads, opt-ins and sales.

Other pitfalls include choosing the wrong markets to advertise in, settling on one ad and sticking with it instead of creating a variety of ads to use and selling products that are too inexpensive and will never earn very much money.

Instant Gratification Using Pay Per Click Ads

Using pay per click advertising gets instant results. Once the initial keyword research is done and you have crafted several ads to run, its time to go live and reap the benefits. Unlike other ways of driving traffic to your website, pay per click ads are posted quickly and visitors will have access to them immediately. These ads aren’t waiting to be indexed or crawled. They are live and working to guide traffic your way instantly.

However tedium is the one thing that pay per click can cause you to lose direction with yours campaigns, but with the evolution of pay per click mean’t that marketers have become more creative and are now delivering to any market with precision and speed.