At some stage, all of us in the Internet marketing and Information publishing arena undoubtedly use pay per click advertising at some stage. For those who are still starting out it can be confusing, so here’s a beginner’s guide to the main ones -- need once you’ve been through this brief outline to go off and have a go, there’s nothing like DIY, you need to see and understand the nuts and bolts of how PPC advertising works. What Is Pay Per Click? Pay per click advertising, or PPC for short, it is certainly a method for helping advertisers drive highly targeted traffic to your site or offline business as well. This is also an online advertising that works for any organization whether offline or online Here’s the History Bit It started in 1997 with Yahoo’s Search Marketing and since then has grown into a variety of different programs. There are a number of different options you can try. The top 3 pay per click search engine advertising programs are Google AdWords, Yahoo’s Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter. Google AdWords This is the top pay per click network and the one you’ll have heard most about. It has an interface that is friendly, clean and easy to use. It takes just a few minutes from the time you create your account until your ads are live and ready to go. It offers lots of different options for your marketing campaign. It costs $5 to get started, and you can bid for as low as $0.01 per keyword, so it’s really flexible. Free to Use Keyword Research Tool It also has its own free keyword research tool to help you choose keywords and phrases to target. Yahoo’s Search Marketing This is the very first search engine that started this all, it has been gone though chnges of names from Yahoo to GoTo, and then Overture, and finally it’s back as Yahoo Search Marketing. Like Google, this search engine enables you to reach a massive number of users with its ppc advertising, and also offers sponsored ads on all of its searches. It is also a comparatively cheap service and they offer special deals from time to time, just go & check it out. Microsoft AdCenter Microsoft’s PPC offering is the best and is top notch; it has campaign to help you customize your ad campaign. It also has a tool that lets you target your customers through free keyword research tool. This feature of Microsoft’s PPC makes a it a wonderful all-in-one package. The Disadvantages Of Pay Per Click I know that PPC sounds very appealing, but you should be aware that there are some areas that you need to look out for, first, you may have a trouble winning your keyword bids, at a competitive price there’s lots of competition for most keyword phrases, so it can take quite a budget to get ones that you may want if they carry very high traffic levels. Top Tip - drill down from top line keywords to cheaper less obvious ones and also consider long tail keywords which can produce some really stunning results for not a lot of advertising budget outlay. Don’t forget PPC is about driving traffic and more importantly targeted traffic so your keyword research is the real key to success.