Copyright 2006 Alicia M Forest and ClientAbundance.com

Would you like to bring targeted traffic to your website in as little as 15 minutes? Then you should learn about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, especially if you are starting to optimize your website for the search engines.

There are four advantages to pay-per-click advertising.

1. You only pay for the advertising that works because you only pay for your ad when someone actually clicks on it to visit your website.

2. You can get your website in the search results within just a few minutes. With search engine optimization, it can take several weeks to get listed in the seach engines, but with PPC, you can literally jump to the front of the line.

3. You can be listed in prime advertising space by simply outbidding the other advertisers. There's a bit of science + art to this, but it's still a much more simple process than trying to figure out the secret formula to the organic (free) search engine rankings.

4. You can have a very small budget and still make pay-per-click advertising work for your business. In fact, my own ads are in the best positions on the first pages for several of my targeted keywords, and I've only spent about $50 to get there over the past 6 months.

And it's not hard to do what I've done!

Just open a free account with Google Adwords, follow the easy steps to setting up your own advertising campaign, decide on a handful of keywords you want to bid on (the words that people in your market are searching for online), put in a few dollars as a daily budget, choose the amount you're willing to pay-per-click, and then watch what happens.

Some people are skittish to do a PPC campaign because they are afraid that it will run away with their money. But you can eliminate that fear because you have total control over how much you spend. Once you reach whatever limit you've decided upon for the day, your ads are no longer shown until the next day, so you'll never spend any more money on your PPC than you decide. You can also pause or delete your campaign if you need to at anytime as well.

If you choose good keywords, write an effective ad, and track your results, PPC advertising can be an excellent way to drive targeted traffic to your website, which ultimately will lead to more sales for you, in the form of new clients and customers.

Just remember that PPCs should be just one part of your overall marketing strategy. In fact, a balance of search engine optimization as well as running a PPC campaign is usually the most effective strategy for bringing your website the most targeted traffic overall.