Pay Per Click (usually just called PPC) is a traffic-generating method that involves paying for each visitor to your site. Depending on your niche and keywords you can expect to pay anywhere from a few cents to 100 Rand or more per visitor. PPC is an easy way for any website to generate lots and lots of traffic, but you have to be very careful or you’ll spend too much and run yourself right out of business.

How exactly does PPC work?

Go to google.com and search for the first thing that comes to your mind. Take a look at the search results. See the column on the right labeled “Sponsored Links”?

Those are advertisements. Website owners and internet marketers paid to have a link to their website listed on that page through a sophisticated system called Pay Per Click.

Let’s look at a real life example:

Pretend you’re in the market for a new charcoal grill for barbeque season. You want to do some research and maybe compare a few different models. So you search for the term “charcoal grills” and, in addition to the regular search results, Google also displays some Sponsored Links.

These links are likely merchants who sell charcoal grills or grill accessories. They each paid to be there by bidding on the term “charcoal grills” with the highest bids receiving the most prominent positions on the page.

They paid to be on that particular page because they know you are looking for exactly what they have to offer. Pretty convenient, huh?

Think about your own niche and what kind of keywords someone would use to find what you’re offering. Then you can use PPC advertising to buy ads to bring in traffic by using those same keywords.

There are countless PPC networks on the internet and more are popping up all the time. Here is a short list of the most popular networks:

Google Adwords
MSN AdCenter

Search Results vs Website Content:

If you’re going to advertise your site through a Pay Per Click network, you’ll need to decide where to advertise. You can bid for a spot on a search engine’s results page for a specific keyword or you can bid to appear on another website whose content is about your keyword.

The general consensus is that you’ll get better results by appearing on search engine results pages. But it really depends on your niche and your ad. The best choice is to test both options and see which works best for you.