You can have the best looking web site in the world promoting a fantastic product, but if your potential customers don't know about it, you won't get any traffic or sales. This is the single biggest problem facing all internet marketers. This is especially so for newbies who frequently get discouraged and give up their attempts to make money online.

What Is Pay per Click

This is one of the more expensive methods of generating traffic, but provides an instant stream of visitors to your site. There are a number of companies offering pay per click advertising, such as Google, Yahoo and Overture, to name but a few. The most well known is the Google Adwords program, which I will use to illustrate the principles of pay per click.

You may have noticed the ads displayed on the right hand side of Google's search page results. Each ad is associated with a keyword phrase (e.g ladies golf clubs) and is displayed next to the search results when someone searches for those keywords.

These ads are known as contextual ads because they are displayed on pages where the content is closely related to the keywords associated with the ad.

You will also come across these ads when you visit certain websites. The same principle applies and the theme / topic of the page matches the keywords associated with the ad. In this instance, the webmaster will receive a payment from Google for displaying their ads. This program is known as Adsense.

How Does Pay Per Click work

Place your ads with Google Adwords and pay for every click that takes a visitor to your site. The price per click is determined by the popularity of the keyword and its position in the list. Prices generally vary between a few cents and $5 but can be very much more for some keywords.

There is no fixed price for a specific keyword or the position where it's displayed on the page. The advertiser specifies the maximum amount they are prepared to pay and then Google uses this and other information from all the other advertisers to work out the position of each ad. Exactly how this is done is outside the scope of this article and many books have been written on the subject.

You can open a free Adwords account with Google Adwords. They have very good online help screens and examples to help you set up your campaigns.

If this method appeals to you, you can at a later stage spend a lot more time specializing in the numerous strategies that have been devised to make this technique successful. In common with all advertising, the secret is to continually test and improve on the performance of your ads. The bottom line is quite simply, if you make more profit than the cost of your ads, you are on a winner. If not, stop immediately and try something else!

A good idea is to get some help in the form of step by step instructions and coaching videos designed specifically for newbies.