Thursday, January 8, 2009

Discovering An Alternative To Google Adwords

By Brian Basch

Pay per click advertising is offering an exciting new trend in Internet marketing. The search engines have at last found a way to make money with online marketing. What do we mean by this?

Traditional methods of advertising were somewhat different. An ad would be paid for according to its duration not exposure. You would simply pay for your ad to be run for a certain length of time, regardless of how much exposure it got.

This could be in several medias; radio, TV, newspaper or online on a web page. The price would be for running the ad for a limited time, and would make it available for all to see. Finally somebody saw the light and figured out that there should be a better way to market online. Of course not all marketing methods gave the same amount of exposure to an ad. For example a busy website would give a lot of exposure to an ad, so why not have a system in place where both advertiser and host could make money?

If you raised prices for the advertiser you would risk losing customers. In fact it could also be detrimental to the credibility of your business. Customers and sales would be lost and your competitors will start to get the edge on you.

Business might not pick up and your site's reputation would suffer. Enter the idea of pay per click advertising. The advertiser writes a small ad based on a good performing keyword. Then they submit it to the search engines, the ad will come up when its keyword is searched for. Every time a searcher clicks through on the ad the advertiser will pay a small fee to the search engine. This means both advertisers and host make money.

When the search engines saw the potential of this idea they decided to develop it. To get better placements, advertisers were invited to bid higher. The advertiser with the highest bid won the best placement, this gave their ads better exposure. Both search engines and advertisers increased their profits.

Apart from Google and Google Adwords there are other pay per click engines. Many people tend to ignore this fact. Some better alternatives are; Microsoft Adcenter, Yahoo Search and Search Feed. If you want to make a profit with pay per click advertising you will need to explore these other options.

It is wise to use as many different tactics for gaining traffic as you can. Using different pay per click engines will help you to expand your business and increase your profits.

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