Why advertise on the web?

The web offers great opportunities to anyone and everyone.  The internet opens opportunities for a much larger customer base at a lower price than ever before.

Getting your page into the search engines takes time.  Getting on the 1^st page of search results for your best search terms (or keywords) takes even longer.  If you are competing for very profitable keywords you may never get your site on the 1^st page of the search results.  This leaves only 1 option – advertising or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.

Who uses PPC?

Given the huge potential customer base and the difficulty of achieving 1^st page search results in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, there's virtually nothing more crucial than PPC for your business.  Especially if you have an online business, website or blog.  Even Walmart advertises online so they can compete immediately on the latest, hottest gadget (review sites and blogs devoted to the gadget will likely dominate the 1^st page or 2 of search engine results).

Having a web page and PPC advertising isn’t just for gadgets either.  A perfect example, of non-gadget advertising, can be seen with the low-budget film entitled "The Blair Witch Project."  You probably didn't really see this "reality" style horror flick advertised on TV much.  This is because the film’s makers had an extremely low budget and therefore thought it would be prudent to advertise on the web.  They built a website that cost them next to nothing.  Once the word got out, everyone was jumping on the Blair Witch bandwagon.

Regardless of what you thought of the film it made millions.  Given the low cost of advertising and filming this is pretty much all profit. This is just one example of how advertising on the Internet can be vital for your business or website's success – especially on a low budget.

PPC can get expensive when done incorrectly…

I’ve learned the hard way that PPC is expensive when it is done incorrectly.  Some people will suggest that you can quickly and easily have your PPC ads up and running in minutes.  They are right but unless you are very lucky those quick and easy ads will lose you a lot of money.

Others will tell you that you must do some keyword research but they don’t generally tell you how.  What I can tell you (without writing a several thousand word hub) is that keyword research is a time consuming, manual, process.  There are several automated tools that can help, however, most of them scrape for every keyword that could be considered remotely related to the topic at hand.  Once all the keywords are gathered the tools filter them by various means.

The most profitable keywords are the ones no one else using.  That’s the problem with using tools that everyone else uses.  The keywords these tools provide are either used by everyone with access to the tool or by just plain everyone.