Suppose that you really need to get traffic to your website NOW. It can take months to rank well with the search engines, and you can't wait that long. The solution to this is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. With PPC you actually pay the search engines to list your website above all the others. This is usually done in a special section of their search results page.

The two top PPC programs on the Internet belong to Google and Yahoo. Google's program is called Google AdWords. This program is the largest PPC system on the internet, hands down. It is also the most expensive, which can actually work to our advantage. I'll explain that a little later.

The way most PPC advertising engines work is like this: You get a small amount of text to put in your ad, usually just a few lines. You then bid on various keywords that you want your ad to be show up for when someone searches for them. The price of the keywords can vary widely, anywhere from 2 or 3 cents to $100 or more for the top spot. As a general rule, the more generic and popular a keyword is the more it costs.

You need to be really careful with some of the more expensive keywords, you can end up owing Google a lot of money very quickly. If a keyword costs yous $2 per click and you get 1000 clicks per day, you will owe Google $2000. I don't know about you, but this is not exactly the best of situations to start a website under.

How do you choose which keywords to use in your PPC campaigns? If you read my article on Adsense sites you can use that method of choosing keywords. The basic method consists of finding keywords that are related to each other, getting the number of searches vs. the number of results for a specific keyword. Take the keywords with the best ratio and the highest pay rate then build a site based on those kewyords.

There is a slight difference when choosing keywords for AdWords campaigns however. You need to look at the total number of other AdWords campaigns that come up for each keyword. Only choose those keywords that have 15 or fewer campaigns running. The number of other campaigns that are running gives you an idea of how much competition you have.

How do you write a good AdWords ad? My favorite technique is actually quite fun, it's the no sale - sale. You actually tell people to go buy someone else's products. You read that right, tell them not to buy your stuff. Tell them to go buy someone else's stuff, so when it doesn't work they will know where to come to get the stuff that does work. here is an example

Don't Buy This Lawn Mower
Go buy someone else's mower.
When it breaks, then come to us.

vs.

The World's Best Lawn Mower
Guaranteed not to break.
Get this and you won't regret it.

Which one would you click on? The first one makes you curious, while the second one sounds like the standard sales pitch. You need to really stand out from the crowd in order to get the kind of traffic that you need. The good news is that with Google AdWords, the better your ad performs the cheaper it costs. You could end up paying very little for the top keywords that are costing most people a lot of money.

You should always be trying to improve your click through rate, no matter what. You can do this through a process called Split Testing. What you do is run two very similar ads at the same time. By similar I mean a one or two word difference, or the top and bottom lines are reversed. Run these ads at the same time with the same keywords, for about 30 clicks per ad. Delete the one that is the worst performer, copy the one that works, and make another small change. Repeat this process indefinitely and your click through rate will definitely go up.

There are several other PPC programs on the Internet, and most of them do not charge the same prices that Google does. The cost of a $3.00 keyword on Google will sometimes be $0.05 on these smaller PPC systems. What I like to do is test out a new PPC campaign using one of these small systems, to limit the cost. Once I am sure that it works I will copy it over to Google and run it there to get quicker results.

Power Tip: Here is a neat little trick: Find the most profitable Adsense keywords, build an Adsense site around those keywords, then setup an ad campaign on one of the smaller PPC systems. You will end up paying only a few cents per visitor, and if they click on your Adsense campaigns, you will get the big payoff from Google. This is commonly referred to as a Traffic Middle-Man site.

If you don't want to put up a website and market it, you can use PPC campaigns to sell other people's products. You will have to join an affiliate program for whatever product you are trying to sell. Once you get your affiliate link you can use it as the destination URL for your PPC ads. If you make a sale, you will get the commision, which pays for the ad.

This is actually the simplest way of making money online that I have found, but it requires some testing to make sure that you are not wasting your money. If you haven't made a single sale after about 300 clicks, stop promoting the product and find something else.

Christopher Shireman has been studying internet marketing strategies since 2004. He became financially independant in early 2006, having created enough internet cash flow to completely support himself. To find out more about how to create profitable websites, check out this Internet Marketing Resource