Next it is important to keep in mind your end goal, which should be sales or to generate a profit.  A common error is to have your end goal as traffic.  Keep in mind that you can always drive a lot of traffic to your site without making any money.  Traffic does not mean success; making money means success or should mean success.  Just keep this in mind while we are heading into the other steps to succeed with PPC advertising.

The effects of having an incorrect goal can be devastating an example is buying 100,000 guaranteed visitors from Ebay or any website that promises a high volume of traffic.  However, what is not known is that this company has an ‘auto-page-generator’ loaded on 100,000 computers that will wiz right past your site and another 10,000 websites in a short period of time.  All that traffic does not even look at your website and will never buy anything in a million years, your website received 100,000 visitors however no sales were made and in the end it was a horrible investment.  A great example of high-quality traffic is advertising through search engines, you may only receive 50 clicks in a day in comparison to the 100,000 however you will receive several sales and make money.

The big three PPC search engines that you want to sign up for are first Google Adwords (adwords.google.com).  The second big search engine to start with would be Bing.  Bing is from Microsoft and is gaining market share it is very important to sign up for Bing (adcenter.microsoft.com/).  The third major search engine is Yahoo.  All three search engines provide high quality traffic and it is extremely important to get started with all three. Bing and Yahoo are currently working together so if you setup two advertising campaigns one of Google and one on Bing you will be able to target over 90% of all internet users.

There are third tier search engines available and several great offers to take advantage of.  I have test drove several third tier search engines and have yet to see a sale from any of them for any of my clients.  The quality of traffic that comes through is very poor and click fraud is extremely high.  With a lot of the 3^rd tier search engines when you signup for $25-100 they will give you free credits for signing up.  A good place to go to get those specials is payperclickuniverse.com/top-pay-per-click-search-engines.php and payperclickuniverse.com/other-pay-per-click-search-engines.php.  If you are interested in signing up go ahead however know ahead of time that they are not as good as Google, Bing and Yahoo.  With a third tier search engine don’t expect to make money.

Again I repeat make sure you sign up for all three big search engines and you will be able to target more than 90% of the search engine market.  Later, after testing results stay with the search engines that produce a positive return.

In the next series we will go over how to setup the actual PPC campaign including setting up a budget, bidding options and setting up the actual campaign.  Find out exactly what common errors are and how to setup your PPC campaign correctly.

Related Articles:

• 75% of PPC Advertisers Don’t Make Money – WHY?
• Dominating PPC 101 – ppc decisions (part 8 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – ad groups (part 5 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – match type (part 4 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – keywords (part 1 of 8 series)