PPC advertising is also an excellent way to get search engine traffic quickly because you can create a campaign in 10 minutes and within an hour, you could be receiving traffic from those ads.

Here’s a screenshot to help illustrate where the Paid vs. Organic listings show up.

The way it typically works in a PPC campaign is you bid for a position. Generally the higher up you are, the more you paid for that position. This makes sense since the higher up you are the more visibility your ad gets.

The big three PPC search engines are the same big 3 regular search engines. There are a ton of others in the game but these are where I recommend starting.

• Google Adwords
• Yahoo Search Marketing
• Microsoft adCenter

Facebook maybe another I would consider trying out. I haven’t personally used them much, but they have some excellent targeting features that make it a very viable option.

When creating your campaign, be as targeted as possible. Bidding on very broad keywords will not only get you untargeted traffic, it will also cost a lot more! Depending on your chosen keywords, you may be paying $0.50 to $1.00 or more PER CLICK. That can add up really fast.

Therefore bidding on “Wilmington, NC” maybe a smart move for a hotel chain in Wilmington for instance, but not so smart for a specialty merchandise store.

Formula: Revenue / Ad Cost = ROI

Let’s say that specialty merchandise store spends $100 on PPC which only brings in 1 customer that nets her $50 in revenue. She’s in the hole by 50% and hasn’t even taken into account the overhead associated with that customer.

The formula here would be: 50 / 100 = 50% ROI

She only got back half of what you put into the campaign.

Now, if you take that same scenario but this time it’s the hotel chain. They have a higher revenue per customer so their ROI would look much different. For this example, we’ll say the hotel nets $250 per customer

This time the formula would be: 250 / 100 = 250% ROI

Hopefully it’s obvious at this point but I’ll say it anyway. For PPC to be a cost effective advertising medium, you must diligently track your costs and you have to know your ROI (Return on Investment).