To Pay Per Click Advertise Or Not?

The question facing anyone who markets online is how to drive more traffic to their website.

Most Internet gurus insist you should pay per click advertise using Google Adwords… or… another major search engine. The benefits of doing ppc advertising are as follows…

Benefit 1: You can drive traffic to your website within minutes. Setting up a Google Adwords campaign is fast and easy. The approval process takes about 5 minutes. In less than a quarter of an hour, you can write your ad and see it running.

Benefit 2: Search engine use is on the rise. Consumers all over the world love the convenience of getting on their computer, logging on to the Internet and surfing for whatever topic they want. It stands to reason then that if you pay per click advertise you will get some of that traffic to your site.

Benefit 3: Split testing your ppc ads allows you to increase conversions over time. Google Adwords built in a split testing function which lets advertisers run two ads at the same time. You can test headlines, body copy, call to action and other elements of your ad. In due time, you’ll be able to find the best pulling ad.

Despite those benefits, the biggest drawback is that Google always changes the parameters advertisers must abide by when they pay per click advertise with Google.

If you don’t set up your website properly… and… create an ad campaign that fits Google’s parameters then you can be “Google Slapped”. That’s a term referring to Google’s punishment of any advertisers who don’t follow the rules. And the punishment is usually in the form of higher per click charges.

In other words, if you set up your website and Adwords campaign the wrong way you can see the charges skyrocket. Maybe you decided to pay 20 cents per click for a certain group of keywords. Should Google determine you’re in violation of their rules… then… you can wake up the next morning with charges of $2.00 per click or more.

I know from experience because it happened to me. I created a website according to the rules (or so I thought), set up the Adwords campaign and decided to pay up to 50 cents per click. A day later I was being charged $5.00 per click and ended up with a $50 bill.

Pay per click advertising does work well for anyone who: (1) learns all the rules and adheres to them religiously… or… (2) pays someone else who is an expert on setting up and managing Google Adwords campaigns.

The other option is to get traffic from the organic search on Google’s pages. Ranking high for keywords with SEO is also tricky. But, believe it or not, it’s easier than you might think if you understand this. The whole key to ranking high is to find keywords that good a decent amount of searches… but… that don’t have a lot of competing web pages.

Then you write articles on those keywords and put those articles on your website. How do you get traffic? Simple. You create two other unique content articles that tie in to one of your articles pages on your website. And you place these other two articles with article directories. Each of these articles (the ones you place with article directories) should highlight a specific keyword that has good search volume but little competition.

This process can quickly have you ranking high in the search engines and getting the benefit of free traffic to your website.

Here’s another way to Pay Per Click Advertise without actually running ads.