PPC Advertising has become a very popular method for getting qualified traffic, building lists of interested individuals in specific arenas, making sales and, in some cases, reaching prospects worldwide where it wouldn't been worthwhile using traditional advertising methods.

PPC Advertising, if used correctly, can set you up financially, but used incorrectly, you can lose your shirt, fast. It's extremely important for people new to PPC to educate themselves by reading one of the excellent books on Pay Per Click Advertising before actually "winging it" and spending money.

There are quite a few different companies that you can select from for your PPC Advertising campaigns, Google Adwords, MSN, Yahoo Search Marketing, Kanoodle, Enhance and many more, but the Top rated is Google Adwords. Google has modified their advertising rules quite a few times now since opening for business five years ago, but still has loyal following. It's estimated that Google gets apx. forty seven percent of the searches being done on the Internet with Yahoo second at 23%, followed by MSN at 11%. Number two and three combined don't the amount of traffic on a regular basis as Google does. This means that placing your ad there can potentially bring you a lot of qualified traffic. It also means that the competition for that traffic will be intense and potentially very expensive, if you don't know what you're doing. Read on.

One of the most recent changes that happened at Google was the ability to separate your "Search Ads" and "Content Ads" within your campaigns. When you use Google Adwords your ads will not only be seen within the Google search engine, but also could be shown on other websites that have related subject matter and also on some of their "Partner Networks". Some of these places are other Pay Per Click Advertiser's similar to themselves, but on a much smaller scale.

For you as an advertiser it's important that you keep these two modes separate when you are running your campaign. You now have the option to either pay less money for the traffic received through the Content ads or you can boot them from your campaign entirely. I recommend that, if you insist on running them, even at a lower cost, you place them in an entirely different campaign on their own. I know that it sounds like a lot of work, but there's a good reason for this. That reason is tracking your ads. If you don't track your ads then you are losing money. It's very important that you know exactly where your clicks and sales are coming from in order to get rid of waste and only pay for what's working. It's virtually impossible to do this when you have each of these running in the same campaign.

If just beginning this may seem like a lot of "chatter" to you. If that's the case, you really must invest in a good book on PPC Advertising, as mentioned above. If you're not new, but this seems like a lot of extra work to you, think of it this way; you could be doing a labor job somewhere or stay in your day job for the rest of your life. What seems worse now? Besides, once you get it set up correctly you'll be able to get rid of the garbage, only pay for what pays for itself, raise your money earned by sending the money that you were wasting into another area of your advertising portfolio and multiply your earnings by doing so. Does this still sound like too much work? Get those PPC campaigns set up right the first time. Good luck!