Wouldn’t it be great, if there were a quick and easy way to generate high-quality leads? And better yet, what if it were inexpensive or at least cost efficient? That way, you only pay for what you need.

Actually, this ideal marketing solution exists. It’s called pay per click (PPC) advertising. PPC ads can help start-ups and small business generate qualified leads and quickly boost sales.

If you’re not using PPC, then it’s time to reconsider you marketing strategy. Here are three compelling reasons you should start advertising with PPC.

#1: PPC Generates High Quality Leads – The major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo feature PPC ads, also known as paid search. Google dominates the search market, so obviously, it has the most popular PPC program – Google AdWords.

But, Bing and Yahoo also supply more than ample search traffic, so you shouldn’t ignore PPC advertising on these search engines.

In any case, the universe of searches for your products or services are vast. PPC advertising allows you to write ads that target your message to prospects who need and want your product or service. Namely, your ads target a specific demographic. That automatically increases your lead quality.

You accomplish that by writing relevant ads. And that’s done by selecting the keywords your prospects use to find your product or service.

Besides targeting a specific market segment, you can also target specific locations: locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. And you can even target specific times you want your PPC ads to run. They can run selected days of the week and certain times of the day.

This further ensures you advertise to the right segment or group of prospects. You’re no longer advertising to the masses. The more targeted your ads, the more click-throughs you’ll get, reducing your costs. With PPC, you’re now advertising more efficiently, but more on that below.

#2: PPC Ads are Highly Measurable – When you want to know which PPC ads work and which don’t it helps that you can run split tests on your ads. Also known as A/B testing, you can run one ad and check its performance. Then run another ad to see how it compares. After selecting a winner in a comparison test, eliminate the loser and write another ad. Then run that against the winner.

Using this deliberate process, you can improve marketing over time. To get the best results, it’s best to run no more than two ads at a time. Use Google’s free tool, website optimizer, to run your split tests.

You can test for click-throughs (CTRs), which is a good starting point. As testing becomes more advanced, you can test for conversion rate as well as cost per conversion.

The bottom line: testing allows you to improve your CTRs and lower your costs.

#3: Control Costs with PPC Advertising – As you know, most advertising isn’t cheap. Start-ups and small businesses alike appreciate this and keep a close eye on their marketing spend. That makes advertising with PPC ads even more valuable.

Looking at Google’s AdWords, businesses can bid for keywords while staying within budget. Some keywords are more expensive than others, but as more prospects click on your PPC ads, the lower the cost of future bids.

Google rewards you for writing relevant ads that generate high CTRs. So as you test and improve you ads over time, you’ll also benefit from reduced bid rates.

Additionally, as mentioned above, you can run your ads at times when it’s most effective to do so. If running an ad is better in the mornings, you can advertise, say, between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Similarly, if your prospects are online in the evening hours, you’d shift your run times to the evening.

Another way to reduce cost is by selecting certain geographical locations – those locations where your prospects are located. If you run an overnight delivery business and you’re located in the Northwest then you’d want to target your city and your region.

It doesn’t make sense to target customers in the south or east, if you only do business in the Pacific Northwest.

Is PPC Advertising Right for You?

If you want to increase the quality of your leads, and do it quickly and relatively inexpensively, then PPC advertising is tough to beat.

PPC advertising offers businesses flexibility and quick results. And it helps smaller companies compete against larger companies with deep pockets.

Online pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC advertising, is one of the most popular ways to get traffic to your website that are used today. With PPC advertising website owners can get targeted visitor traffic to their websites without having to stretch their budgets too far.

PPC advertising works on the following premise: that you only pay when the advertising has done its job. Essentially, you bid on certain strategic keywords or key phrases with search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. If you win the bid for that term your website ad will come up high on the list of advertisers when those keywords are looked for in any online search.

The benefit of using PPC advertising is that you only pay your bid on a key word or key phrase if customers click on the link to your ad in the search engine results. The more your ad is clicked on, the more you pay. The overall goal with any PPC advertising campaign is to get website traffic and if you are paying more, you are getting more visitors to your website.

There are some important things to know as you begin to consider any pay-per-click advertising campaign. First, it is very important that you choose the keywords that are best suited to your particular web site. Your advertising dollar will do you little good if the people who find you through your PPC ads are not looking for whatever it is you are selling.

PPC advertising can be a very successful marketing tool when used correctly, but you must maximize the efficiency of your ads in order for it to work well for your business. Pay-per-click advertising can be used as your only method of online advertising, or it can be used in conjunction with various other forms of advertising.

PPC advertising can typically take one of two forms. First are the ads you see spread throughout the Internet. These may be obvious or can be more effectively merged into the site construction – they offer a short blurb describing your business and a link to your website. The second common form of PPC advertising is paid search engine rankings. This strategy allows customers searching for your particular keywords to find you at the top of the search engine listing, even if your site ranking wouldn’t normally place you there otherwise.

There are many different ways to get your web site seen online. This type of advertising makes sense to people who want to make sure that they are only paying for results, and not pre-paying for something that may or may not prove beneficial. This is where pay-per-click advertising works best for website owners; you only pay when someone clicks on your website through the search engine.

As an owner of several online business websites myself, I’ve learned that using PPC advertising can be beneficial in several ways. When I completed my first business web site and was ready to launch it, I wasn’t really sure how I was going to attract new customers. A friend of mine was using PPC advertising with her own website, and explained the process to me.

Generally speaking, you bid for key words and key phrases that are targeted to your websites audience and if you win one of the top bids the search engines will rank your website on or close to the top of the list when people look for those keywords. Tip: you basically want to be seen in one of the top three ads if possible, for best exposure.

The great thing about PPC advertising is that you only pay a certain amount when someone clicks on your ad link when it comes up in the search engine. To me, PPC advertising is a win-win situation, and though it isn’t the only form of advertising I use, it is definitely one that I will frequently use.

If you are trying to get more exposure for your website you really should take a serious look at PPC advertising. It has proven over the last couple of years to be one of the most effective marketing tools in the business. It has been estimated that millions of dollars are paid out per year for PPC advertising, proving that it really has a place in online advertising. PPC advertising works because people respond to it.

Whether you are into PPC advertising to make money or you need exposure for your website you will find this type of marketing very lucrative. Google has really made a name for itself with pay per click advertising with its AdSense program and there are many programs that have followed on its heels.

Web publishers like the idea of PPC advertising because the links are relevant and they get paid for each web visitor that clicks on the link. Advertisers like the pay-per-click advertising method because their ad is placed on relevant web pages. Because the idea is to make the web page and the advertisement relevant to one another more people will click, benefiting both parties.

Pay-per-click advertising is simply genius, no matter what side of the business you are on. It works because if people don’t find all of the info they need in one particular place they will then click on the links on that page. Also, people trust web pages that provide good content, so they assume that the links on the page are worth clicking. All around PPC advertising works because it is set up to work! This is a truly flawless advertising plan.

Is PPC advertising suitable for you? If you’re looking to increase your online presence, find new customers, sell more product or simply make your brand known, PPC advertising may be right for you. With careful thought, pay-per-click advertising can be both profitable and beneficial for your online business.

Many online marketers, both new and experienced, have used ppc advertising to advertise their website businesses.

PPC advertising; also known as pay per click advertising or ppc search marketing, has the potential to bring INSTANT traffic to your website.

Additionally, if you only wanted to advertise your brand online, then ppc advertising can allow you to publicize your brand or promote your business name on the Internet, often at little or no cost.

Many a time, however, internet marketing practitioners will encounter problems with their search marketing or ppc advertising campaigns.

An online marketer like you and I could potentially spend large amounts of money on ppc advertising, but yet not make any sales or generate targeted online leads. Some of us may remember watching the number of clicks and our ppc advertising costs rising continually but without having made any sales or acquired many email leads.

What could be worse is that you could end up getting jaded or disillusioned with ppc advertising methods and stop using them completely.

Certainly, setting up an effective ppc advertising campaign may well require a fair amount of time and effort, sometimes over multiple attempts of trial and error.

If you have tried ppc advertising, then you can probably remember all the keyword research, the webpages, tracking codes, keyword tracking systems, website analytics that you had to prepare and monitor?

As an online business owner doing your own website marketing, you would probably want the biggest website advertising “bang” for your buck.

Now, enter the free website advertising methods and techniques, which are also options that you can consider as alternatives to ppc advertising.

Naturally, if you wanted to replace ppc advertising with free website advertising, you will need to learn how to apply online advertising and Internet marketing techniques like:

1) article marketing

2) marketing with online videos

3) using your own website blogs as a form of free website advertising

4) applying web 2.0 website advertising techniques to drive traffic to your website

Also, let’s not forget that you have the choice of doing forum posts, blog comments, and joint venture marketing, all of which can be very effective as methods of free website advertising.

Given the many choices for advertising your website for free, should you then choose to replace your existing ppc advertising with free website advertising?

Perhaps, one possible approach is this — If you are not getting the ppc advertising results you want, then you can continue to learn the methods of ppc advertising, refine your techniques, and improve your pay per click advertising skills.

Meanwhile, it would certainly be a good idea for you to start learning and applying one or two other techniques in free website advertising.

The additional effort that you put into free website advertising will actually complement or supplement your existing ppc advertising efforts.

In other words, you can increase website traffic using free methods to advertise your website while you continue to market with and learn about ppc advertising.

Suppose you are doing pretty well and making a profit with ppc advertising. If this is the case, great job!

Why not also apply some of the many techniques that are available to you for getting free traffic to your website.

At the end of the day, a good internet marketing strategy to adopt might be to have several effective and consistent website traffic streams that will send visitors to your site.

Traffic to your websites could and should come from both free and paid website advertising sources. This approach ensures recurrent traffic to your website from a variety of advertising media and methods and will allow you to stay profitable while you make money online.

Tony C is a student and practitioner of Online and Internet Marketing and regularly uses both free website traffic and paid website traffic generation techniques to market online.