Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Exploring Pay Per Click Programs As An Alternative To Adwords

By Brian Basch

A new concept in Internet marketing has emerged with the advent of Pay Per Click advertising. It seems that the search engines have finally managed to perfect the art of making profits with online promotions. Now what precisely does this mean?

Let us pause for a moment to reflect on the way advertising used to be done. You would simply place an ad with a company, pay them for running it and it would be exposed to many people.

This could be in several medias; radio, TV, newspaper or online on a web page. The price would be for running the ad for a limited time, and would make it available for all to see. Finally somebody saw the light and figured out that there should be a better way to market online. Of course not all marketing methods gave the same amount of exposure to an ad. For example a busy website would give a lot of exposure to an ad, so why not have a system in place where both advertiser and host could make money?

If you raised prices for the advertiser you would risk losing customers. In fact it could also be detrimental to the credibility of your business. Customers and sales would be lost and your competitors will start to get the edge on you.

So what about pay per click advertising? It is a simple concept with the advertiser submitting a keyword based ad to the search engines. The ad will come up with the search results for the keyword. Each time the ad is clicked by a visitor the advertiser pays the search engine a small amount of money. This allows both host and advertiser to make money.

When the search engines saw the potential of this idea they decided to develop it. To get better placements, advertisers were invited to bid higher. The advertiser with the highest bid won the best placement, this gave their ads better exposure. Both search engines and advertisers increased their profits.

Of course many people will still associate Google and Google Adwords with pay per click advertising and tend to ignore the other engines out there. However there are other significant engines. The biggest names are Yahoo Search, Microsoft Adcenter, and Search Feed, to name just a few pay per click engines. To make more money marketers should try some of these other engines as well as Google and Google Adwords.

Multiple methods of drawing traffic to your site will help you to develop your business. When you use different pay per click options you can increase your sales and skyrocket your business. - 16069

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