PPC (pay per click) campaigns are a great way to build visibility to your website and bring first page exposure to your products and services. This can be particularly useful if you lack exposure due to poor SEO, or if you have a flash site with poor linking strategy. I am not saying that if this is the case, you don’t need to consider optimizing your website, and just focus on PPC strategies. SEO is a central element for any website looking for exposure, but PPC can deliver a message quickly and efficiently, and if well managed, at an interesting cost.
There are many search engines that can deliver PPC management softwares (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc…). The most mainstream one is Google Adwords, and I recommend starting with this one. If you see that your campaign yields good results, you can then consider other PPC providers.

Setting up a PPC campaign is relatively simple. Making it profitable, at an optimum cost can get a bit more complex. There are many things to consider for that, but in the mean time in this article I will just provide with a few basics.

PPC campaigns work on a bidding system for keywords. Basically this means that you bid for keywords that are relevant for you. If you want to sell shoes, your keywords will target footwear expressions. You want to be be careful in choosing your keywords. If you sell a specific type of shoe, say jogging shoes, then you want to select words that are relevant. If you lack inspiration, Google has a very useful tool you can use to select your keywords: the Google Keywords Tool.

Once you have your keywords, you’ll need to work on your ads. This is a very important part of your PPC campaigns, has it is what will entice people to visit your site. You have to realize that you will only be allowed a limited number of characters to deliver your message. So you have an obligation to be concise but enticing. You want the title of the ad to ideally comprise your main keyword (which should be also displayed in your landing page title), and include in the the remaining part of the ad secondary keywords with a a call to action. Very important, make sure your ad brings visitors not to your homepage, but to directly to the page promoted by your site. This way you’ll experience lower costs, and higher conversion rates. And you want that!

When bidding for your keywords, start low, and with time, progressively increase the bid for the more market competitive keywords if needed. Eventually, if  your ad quality score, you won’t need to increase significantly your bids to appear in the top rankings of sponsored links. Your quality score is determined by a set of factors, the main one being your CTR (click throug rate). The higher your CTR, the higher your quality score. This is a major factor in determining whether or not your ad will be shown, as well as determining its placement and cost. If your quality score is high, even if you bid for a keyword at a lower price than a competitor bidding for the same kyword, your ad might just get a better ranking than your competitor.

Finally, you want to install a tracking system to measure your CPA (cost per action). This will tell you which keyword and ad did or did not convert, and will enable you overtime to just keep those that perform best.

I realize that there are many other things to cover on this subject, but like i said, this is just a short introduction, and will cover more specifically other themes related to PPC strategies, like landing pages, contextual advertising, and campaign structures. So make sure to come back and visit.