Pay Per Click Advertising For Home Business Owners

by: Kevin O'Hara

The biggest stumbling block for most home business owners is marketing their business. Most will start at free to post FFA pages and safelists. Most free advertising will never be seen by anyone and as a result business owners get discouraged and quit.

Pay Per Click search engines are one of the most effective tools you can use to bring quick targeted traffic to your site. With pay-per-click search engines, you pay every time a visitor clicks on your link, anything from a few cents to a few dollars. Lets say you have a site that sells camping gear and you want to rank in the top ten in the search engines for the term camping gear. To be ranked in one of the top ten spots in the free search engines, you'd probably be looking at several months’ minimum, if ever. But in the pay-per-click search engine you can grab a top ten spot anytime you want. That's because all you have to do is see how much the person who has the position you want is paying per click, and simply outbid them by paying one penny more. Then when your potential customer searches for the term camping gear your link will show up as one of the top 10 listings on the search results page. Each time someone clicks on your link, you'll pay however much you have bid for that position.

The advantages of bidding on keywords with pay per-clicks are that you get highly targeted advertising, because you only pay when someone actually clicks through to your site. Your listing get posted quickly and you can start profiting from increased traffic almost immediately. In order to be in one of the top ten positions, all you have to do is outbid your competitors, which is only a matter of a penny more per click.

Done right, pay-per-click advertising can be very profitable and to help you ensure your campaigns are profitable avoid keywords that are too general. General keywords will attract a lot of traffic but drive up the cost of your pay per click campaign and convert very few visitors to sales because general search terms aren't specific enough or in very high demand. Try using keyword phrases, two or three words that pertain to your business. Use any search term suggestion tool and put in your keyword. The results will show your term, how many times it has been searched and also show many different variations. Try to pick one that is more specific to what you’re trying to advertise using two or three words. That will lower you’re cost and be more targeted. The money you save by doing this will enable you to bid on more keywords and you can still get the same exposure without competing for the expensive terms.