Pay Per Click Advertising Channels

For those with money to invest and the time to work their website full time, there are several options within the Pay Per Click (PPC) model to choose from. The simplest explanation of PPC is that an advertiser will only need to pay for his ad placement when someone clicks on it. Pay per click advertising relies heavily on an understanding of the importance of keywords to place their advertisements in targeted market areas.

For a website owner who is seeking some extra income, services like Google's AdSense and Yahoo! Search Marketing provide the service of scanning the content of a web page and displaying advertisements that match the general topic. These ads will rotate through time as the content of the page changes or old ads expire.

The webmaster makes his money off a small; usually one to three cents, commission from being the originating website. Some of these programs will track and pay a percentage off any sale resulting from the click through. Using this method, you will need to focus your page and make it search engine optimized or you might find your ad space filled with public service announcements which appear when the search engine can find no clear subject matter on the page and there is no commission paid for any resultant click through.

Another way to generate income from these PPC programs is to be the advertiser. Using this method to generate income requires a lot of work and study to find words that are popular in search engine requests. The more frequently a word is found to be in search queries, the more valuable it becomes as a keyword and advertising marketers will then bid on the keywords of their choice. Because these ads are shown only on search result pages that have typed in the word, thus targeting more precisely, the advertiser may have to pay a dollar or more if that "sponsored ad" is clicked by the viewer.

While this may result in increased advertising costs, the focused marketing means that there is a greater likelihood of a sale being generated. This type of advertising can be similar to investing in a stock market as you may spend a lot for no returns if you have erred in your judgement as to what words will work. However, with enough expertise to find the right words, fortunes can be made through investing your time into learning and researching keyword popularity.

Another similar form of pay per click advertising can be found in the comparison shopping search engines like Shopping.com. nexTag and TripAdvisor. Here instead of keywords, you will be bidding for placement of your popular product against other advertisers with the same or similar product or service.

All the Pay Per Click models of income generation will require some time and effort to learn how they work. Some trial and error time will help as you find what specific direction you need to take with your program. And you will need some finances to invest
so you can run your campaign. As many successful merchants will tell you, the risks are great, but the rewards are better.