In a world that rewards free advertising such as search engine optimization, social media marketing, online press releases, and ad exchanges, why would any company want to spend money on advertising? Pay per click advertising may be very good for driving traffic, but its equally as good as busting budgets. Isn’t it?

It’s a good to ask: Why? Why use pay per click at all if you can reach people for free?

There is, of course, more than one answer. A popular answer is that you can reach your market more quickly with PPC than with other forms of marketing. Articles, for instance, are great traffic drivers, link builders, and online marketing tools – and they are free. But you won’t get results within hours. The same could be said of any online marketing strategy that is free. They’re good, but you can’t expect results within hours. With pay per click advertising you can.

With search engine advertising, you can throw up a landing page, write an ad, set your budget, and watch it go live then wait an hour or two and see your traffic start climbing. If you have a good sales page you might even see some sales. Try that with other online media tools.

Two other reasons companies use advertising are 1) it’s easily track able and measurable; and 2) you can target your marketing specifically to the people you are trying to reach.

With benefits like these, why wouldn’t you use pay per click?

If you’re new on the scene in certain niches – like technology, travel, real estate, making money online, and a few others – it can be daunting to dive into pay per click advertising with click bids up around $5 per click. How do you do it?

First, you’ve got to be sure that you’ve done your keyword research properly. It isn’t enough to break into a niche. You’ve got to make sure that you are targeting the right audience for your specific corner of that niche. Which brings me to my main point: Long-tail specialization.

The surest way to break into an overcrowded niche is to focus on the long tail. Your click bids will cost less, you’ll be able to make more budget stretch longer, and you’re more likely to reach a hungry market that is ready to buy right now – if you have the right product. Think about it: Many online marketers have been at it for 10 years or more. How many special offers do you think consumers have seen in that time?

The fact is, breaking into any market is tough. Online, you can lose your shirt (and your pants) if you don’t have a solid plan backed up by awesome action. So get with it. Focus on the long tail, produce a product that is so mouth watering that no one can resist it, build a great landing page, and drive targeted traffic with a well optimized pay per click advertising campaign that focuses on your long tail keywords. Oh, and set a budget and stick with it.

Think long tail. Specialization. Be competitive.

Everyone seems to be going bonkers over social media, but pay per click advertising is where it’s at.

If you watch the latest blogs or hang out at Twitter you’ll see all kinds of buzz going over social media. But how much over pay per click? Not much. Yet, PPC advertisers realize a much higher return on investment than social media marketers. Much higher.

Don’t believe me? Then try this: Invest $100 in a highly optimized pay per click campaign with a specific well-optimized landing page that is ready to convert and take the same landing page and submit it to 100 social media websites. See how much traffic you get from the social media sites versus how much you get from the search engine advertising. But don’t just look at numbers. You might only get 50 highly targeted visitors from your PPC campaign and 1,000 visitors from social media, but what is your conversion rate?

If you only get one conversion from your PPC campaign, that’s a 2% conversion rate. Not much, but it’s something. But if you get 5 conversions from your social media campaign, that’s a 1/2% conversion rate. Now double it. 10 conversions. Good for you. But that’s only half the conversion rate of your PPC campaign. That’s not so good.

Most people using social media look at the 10 conversions and think they are doing better because they’ve made more sales for the same dollar investment. True, your real ROI may be greater, but your actual ROI is not.

I’m not saying don’t use social media. I am saying you should use PPC because it converts better and drives more targeted traffic to your website. If you use both social media and pay per click, your life (and sales for your business) will be much better.

Each pay per click advertising campaign is only as good as the tools that helped it be born. Every PPC advertiser owes a debt to the tools that help him succeed and if you want to succeed as a PPC advertiser then you need to rely on the best PPC tools available. Here’s a clue: Most of them are free.

The following three tools are absolutely essential for running effective pay per click campaigns no matter where your ads appear:

• Keyword research tool – Really, this is your starting point. You cannot succeed in PPC without knowing which keywords are the best ones to target for your business. It all starts here. But which tool is the best tool? That largely depends on your goals and what you want to get out of it, but there is one tool that I would not dream of consulting no matter what else I might be using. The Google Keyword-Based Search Tool. Don’t leave your planning with out.
• Analytics – You can’t control what you don’t measure and without an analytics package of some sort, you’ll never be able to measure how well your PPC campaigns are doing. Whether you use a free analytics tool like Google Analytics or a paid metrics package, be sure that you have an adequate one that will help you measure the important stats.
• Text Editor - You’re going to build landing pages, right? I certainly hope so, and you need a system for doing so. You need an adequate text editor to help you design landing pages that convert traffic to sales. It can be a free one or a tool you spend hard-earned money on, but without a good text editor you just can’t do business.

These three tools are the very basics of what you’ll need to run succcessful pay per click advertising campaigns. Anything more than that is gravy.

You’ve likely heard that pay per click advertising is a good place to start for new websites. Why is that? Here are five reasons why pay per click advertising is good for new websites:

1. Organic rankings takes a while – You might rank very high for your targeted keywords, but it isn’t very likely that you’re going to any time soon. Even with the very best optimization, most websites don’t rank on the first page of Google for their key search terms until at least 6 to 12 months down the road. That’s a long time to wait to make a sale. Even if you are in a niche with little competition it could three months before you see high rankings. With pay per click advertising you can appear on the first page of the listings for your key search terms on day 1.
2. Blogs don’t convert well – If you blog (and you should) you’ll high rankings more quickly than you will with a static website. Individual blog posts are great for hitting page 1 really fast, but they also fall off of page 1 really fast. Plus, you can traffic to your blog through social networks like Facebook and BlogCatalog as well as Technorati and social bookmarking sites. But blog traffic traditionally doesn’t convert well. People read then leave. They may come back at a later date to read another blog or even subscribe to your RSS feed, but they won’t buy on the first visit. If they do buy it will be down the road after they’ve become more familiar with you. Blogs are good, they just aren’t right now good.
3. Article marketing takes a long time – Article marketing, even the best article marketing, is a slow process. It’s a good thing to do to build links and drive traffic. I’m not knocking it. But very few article marketers get a swarm of traffic that lead to conversions overnight.
4. Pay per click clickers are ready to buy right now – If a searcher sees a pay per click and clicks on that ad they are ready to buy right now. People do not randomly go about clicking on ads. If someone makes a search and sees your ad in the SERP and clicks on it they are ready to buy. Capitalize on that.
5. Per per click is perfect for limited budgets – If you have a limited budget to start your marketing with, you want that budget to go a long way. You want to see some ROI and you want to see it quickly. If you hire ghostwriters to write your content for your blog, articles, and other marketing collateral, that money could be well spent but when will you see an ROI? With pay per click, you pay for the advertising after it has been effective and you get immediate pay back when you convert that traffic to a sale. The ROI comes much sooner.

Pay per click advertising is a good place to start your online marketing if you have a new website. You can add the other stuff later when you’ve started counting your profits.