What is the best Pay Per Click strategy?

I can say, hand on heart, that I had never even heard of pay per click advertising up to just over 18 months ago. I was a navigator and had occasionally noticed those tiny ads along the right side of search results.

Now I make my living from pay per click advertising campaigns - both promoting affiliate programs, my sites. This from an initial position of zero knowledge. I say this not to brag about how great they are - I've actually found a steep learning curve - but I say to inspire you, the reader. If I can do it, anyone can!

I started looking for a way to work from home and stumbled across affiliate programs and PPC. I was intrigued. How can something that I had never heard of work? Yet ... Here was a way of doing business that had a total sense. You pay only for the people who actually click on your ad and in theory have an interest in your product or program.

I just made the classic mistake of thinking of traffic (people clicking on my ad) is automatically equal sales. I set up my first campaign with enthusiasm with Google and type the keywords I thought people would come in their research. I had a research tool called Good Keywords (available as a free download from Softnik Technologies) and I thought we should choose the most popular words to get the most traffic.

I watched with pleasure as the number of people clicking my ads grew and grew. Then he realized with horror that I was making no sales. AARRRGHH! "I knew it would not work," I muttered, but somehow I just knew it would end.

Back to the drawing board. I devoured ebooks and websites on the internet pay per click marketing, and eventually the light bulb went off. It is not much traffic at all costs that drive up sales. Rather it is extremely focused on small groups of key words that you know will send BUYERS. To this end I started ignoring the words searched massively and instead used the bottom of the list of keywords found by my software.

This has several advantages. First, the competition probably will not bother with these words, so it appears higher in the ranking pay per click ad. Secondly you can find many, many low-cost keywords that work wonderfully. The words are generally more expensive ones everybody wants! Finally, we tend to find some very specific phrases at the bottom of the list, which means that you can target ads to "niche" market share and clean up: o)

One thing I have not mentioned is your budget. Calculate how many ad clicks it takes to make a sale. (Do this by running an advertising campaign and pending sales of say 3) Then look at your profit for that product. It may be common sense - but you have to price your shots so that the number of clicks for each x price is less than the profit!

I also have a golden rule - 500 clicks and no sales means that the campaign dropped like a hot potato. I have to make an announcement on the basis of totally different keywords or go find another product to sell.

I hope this brief overview of pay per click has given you some tips and also the belief you can do. I know you can do it .......