Pay Per Click Advertising and Pitfalls

Internet marketing, as its name implies, is the promotion of a product or service using the Internet. This is one of the marketing outlets today that entrepreneurs are taking advantage of because (1) the Internet captures a wider audience (think worldwide), and (2) it is a cheaper than television, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising.

But as the demand for the Internet as a marketing vehicle becomes grows, it becomes a new battlefield where various businesses compete for attention of a prospective customer. Whoever is persistent and is on the top of the search engine gets the sale.

To be on top, Internet marketers employ various strategies and ties together all the aspects of the Internet - its design, development, advertising and sales into one moving force to engage customers and get the sale.

If you want to venture into making business in the Internet, you must know the basics of how you will be able to make your website, your products and services remain visible to web users.

Pay Per Click Advertising

The Pay Per Click advertising model involves a trigger that generates a payment from the merchant. The trigger is that the ad is clicked and the merchant pays the affiliate.

The advantage of this set-up is that even if an affiliate does not generate clicks, and therefore no sales, the merchant has no costs at all. Follwing the main business Models

Bid-based PPC In a bid-based PPC, an advertiser competes with other advertisers in an automated fashion in a private auction of the publisher or advertising network. The bid is the amount that an advertiser is willing to pay for a given ad spot, which is usually a keyword.

Flat-rate PPC In a flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount as payment for each click. Advertisers can negotiate a lower fixed amount committing to a long-term contract.

The flat-rate PPC model is popular in price comparison services. Price comparison services present the various list of prices for a specific product or service. Examples of this are PriceWatch and Streetprices. An advertiser do not pay to be listed, instead pays for every click on a price.

Automated bid management systems are used to maximize success and cover as many areas as possible.

Getting Started

The following are what you need to remember in getting started with PPC advertising:

1. Choose 10 to 15 keywords and expressions of different categories related to your product or service. You must use quality keywords to get the target audience. This is the trickiest part of PPC advertising and must be the subject of a study before finalizing the keywords. Reach-out to those who really wants to buy and no one else.
2. Use selling words, such as sale, guarantee, delivery, etc. in the composition of your advertisement to eliminate non-commercial inquiries.
3. The three important components of an ad for a PPC are the header, the advertisement text and the link to the website of the advertiser. The ad must be interesting and able to convince a buyer. It must also be concise, without stops, and precise.
4. You have to bid if you want the most desirable keywords. The higher the bid, the higher is your ranking.

PPC Advertising Pitfalls

A problem with this online advertising method is that it is open for abuse. Click fraud, which generates a charge using a simulated user of a web browser maliciously, clicks on the link without having a genuine interest in the target of the advertisement. This type of Internet crime is a cause of controversy because the fraud benefits the advertising network. It has since been considered a felony in a number of states in the USA.

Pay Per Click Advertising is only one of lots of other possibilities to make your web visible on the Internet. There are other similar models like PPV (Pay Per View) or getting found naturally with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques.