Pay per click (PPC) marketing is a very lucrative business for search engines. It can both make or break a marketer – especially one who’s new to online marketing and doesn’t know the cons of PPC well enough to know what to avoid.

The term pay per click is one that you need to fully understand before you get involved with this advertising method. Marketers who use this tactic agree to pay PPC search engines for clicks that arise due to keywords that people will use to find their websites.

More often than not in this method, the best keywords will go to the person whose site fits most closely with the search engine’s algorithm – details like site relevancy, etc. Your site and ad are given scores, so it’s not all about who has the highest bid out there.

To be successful with PPC marketing, you have to know how much each click is going to cost you versus what you’ll be getting back on the click through. What it boils down to is that you’re paying to get the traffic you want to your website, but you have to make sure that you can afford it and that it’s going to be profitable for you in the long term.

It can be helpful in that the traffic you get targeted traffic quickly – there’s no waiting for a site to get indexed or to rise in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Unfortunately, there are sites selling products teaching PPC methods without warning marketers that search engines can quickly reach your maximum per day spending allowance, so if you put $200 a day, it will spend that for you easily.

Don’t be taken in by a product offering you great rewards by using PPC without knowing what the potential risks are as well. You can get traffic to your website using pay per click methods, but it’s not something that you absolutely have to do in order to promote your site and pull in the right customers.

When you pay for advertising like this, you have the opportunity to get top listing spots on whatever search engine you bid with. Your visibility is higher than the competition because you can get paid and organic search traffic.

A PPC ad campaign will have a title, followed by a couple of short lines of copy, and a link at the bottom. Make every word count. Test and tweak your ads for their best performance. One quick way to check out what to write in the small space you have is to see what competitors are saying and then do it better.