Pay per click internet advertising is one of the most common ways for sites to get the traffic they want. However, it may be surprising to some that even though many businesses utilize pay per click, they are rarely getting what as much as they can out of it. Why? There are many reasons, but one of the most common is that they don't understand it that well. 

The basics are fairly easy to cover. PPC or pay per click is really just a way of creating an advertisement that appears only when certain keywords are typed into the search engine request. This is how Google Adwords works, and this single PPC network controls over 80% of the market. So what PPC, at it's core, comes down to is accurately researching your keywords for your business. 

Now, the keywords cannot be just any keywords that you select, they must be relevant to the site that you are promoting. The site you are promoting is page or "landing page" where a visitor will go after they click on your advertisement. If the keywords in your ad are not relevant to the keywords on your landing page, your ads may not run, or they will not be effective because ads that are more relevant will appear on higher up the page than yours. This rank order of ads is called "position". Generally speaking, the closer to the top of the page your ad is, the better it will do in sending traffic to your site. 

Here is the key to remember- Because most PPC networks rely on keywords to generate the right ads for the right traffic at the right time, your ability to choose the most relevant keywords is the main determiner of your success. As my smart readers may have already guessed, you might think that all advertisers in a given market will be competing to pick the same keywords for their site, and you would be correct. Because of this, networks like Google Adwords have created a "bid" system for keywords that basically ranks the highest bidder for a keywords' ad at the top of the page. 

In other words, whoever pays the most for the most coveted keywords does the best. However, you can avoid this and still be as successful or more successful than those paying top dollar. 

What most advertisers do is play "follow the leader" and try and fight to pay the most for the top 20 keywords in a given niche. This is totally unnecessary, and drives up your advertising costs, and your risk unnecessarily. What you need to do is get let in on a way to find other keywords that are relevant, but not nearly as competitive for your site. This is not as hard as it sounds, as is usually the hallmark of any successful PPC marketer.