PPC or pay per click advertising has been touted by many as being the way in which they have made a lot of money online. But does that mean it is suitable for everyone? And is it really still worth doing anyway, or has it seen its best days already?

This is an intriguing question anyway, but especially so considering that the economy is far from at its best at the moment. Whatever you think of it, PPC costs money – and every cent we spend has to be carefully evaluated at present to ensure we are going to get a good return from it. With less people out there spending less money, it could easily turn into an expensive mistake.

One thing you need to be aware of is that different people approach their PPC campaigns in different ways. Some of them like to control the whole thing themselves. Others hire an outside company to do it all for them, using their knowledge and expertise to gain what often turn out to be better results.

Of course there are certain forms of online marketing that can be done for very little cost at all. We can reasonably expect these to receive a boost during hard times, so there is no reason to suspect that it will be any different at the moment. It makes sense to look at what is working and what isn’t, though, because there is little logic in continuing with something that effectively involves throwing money away. In the same sense, if your existing PPC campaign is creating a profit (i.e. bringing in more money than you are spending on it) then I cannot see why it should ever be stopped.

However that is just scratching the surface of what is going on here. There are plenty of marketers out there who will tell you that this form of advertising is very definitely still worthwhile – provided you are doing it right. There are thousands of people who think that PPC advertising is a quick and easy way to make money. And of course we know that this isn’t the case. It takes knowledge and skill to get the best results from pay per click, and that means you must make every effort to ensure you keep an eye on what is going on.

A campaign that previously did well and is now dying on its feet does not mean that pay per click is not working any more. It means you need to change what you are doing. And if that means hiring a company to get the best possible results for your needs, then that could mean the difference between success and failure.

In truth, pay per click advertising still works very well for those who apply their knowledge and experience to it to get the results they want. It is not (and it has never been) a ‘set it up and forget it’ type of strategy. Markets change, people change and requirements change all the time.

So if you think that PPC isn’t worth bothering with any more, perhaps it would pay you well to think about whether you have changed with the market or not. If you haven’t, you should take a fresh look at this form of advertising.

The most important part of any pay per click advertising campaign as far as you are concerned – apart from getting lots of extra traffic to your website that is – is that your money goes as far as it possibly can.

Now it probably won’t surprise you to know that bidding on the term ‘credit card’ will cost you far more than it would to bid on the term ‘grasshopper’. You’d be looking at dollars rather than cents – and a lot more competition to boot.

So what do you do if you have a website which is all about credit cards, and you can’t afford to compete with the big guns that can afford to pay $30 or more per click?

Simple – you change your focus to make your money go further.

Incidentally this applies whatever topic your website happens to be focused on. Unless you have chosen a real niche topic to design your website around, you are likely to have a reasonable amount of competition to go up against whenever you create a new pay per click campaign. The key to success – and to making whatever budget you have stretch as far as possible – is to make sure you bid on the keywords that no one else is targeting, and that will bring in exactly the kind of people you are looking for.

Now you want to ensure that whatever terms you bid on are relevant to your website, so make a list of keywords you have used in your site that could be good to bid on as part of your pay per click campaign. You can make good use of Google’s keyword tool here to find out what kind of figures you would be looking at per click to bid on certain terms, as well as what position they would come in. By making use of this tool you will be able to find the best terms to use which will bring you the most targeted traffic, while also ranking fairly low in cost.

Another good point to remember when you are looking at making your budget go further is to set daily limits on how much you can spend. If you have a monthly limit you won’t want to be spending it all in the first couple of days, so divide it by the number of days in the month and set that amount as your daily limit.

This also has the benefit of allowing you to test the reaction to the keywords you have chosen, without losing a lot of money in the process. It could be that the first keyword you bid on doesn’t bring the desired result; in which case you will want to try another one.

It always pays to be cautious when you try out pay per click advertising, especially for the first time. While it can bring excellent results very quickly, you need to do your homework and make sure you know what you are aiming to achieve in order to have the best chance of achieving it.

Keyword selection tools are invaluable for every single website owner in existence. Thinking up keywords to use on your website isn’t always the easiest job, and there is every chance you will forget one or two good ones that would bring great results if only you’d thought of them earlier.

The same applies to your pay per click campaigns. If you try and organize one without using a keyword selection tool to help you, there is a much higher chance of wasting your money by bidding on search terms that aren’t realistically going to bring you the traffic you are looking for.

The good news is that there are plenty of good – and free – tools online that will help you find the best words without having to rack your brains in the process. Simply go to Google or Yahoo and type in ‘keyword selection tools’ to see a list of the best ones.

The main point to remember with any selection tool like this is to enter a more generic word to begin with. This will return a longer list of search terms to consider – but it will also ensure that you get search terms you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

Let’s say for example that the focus of your website is writing. If you type just that one single word into a keyword selection tool, you will get all kinds of results coming back at you. If you were to limit your initial search to something a little more targeted (writing for magazines, for example) then you wouldn’t have so many results to consider once the tool had done its work.

The next step is to ensure you don’t pick a high scoring keyword or phrase purely because it receives lots of searches every day. You need to make sure it is relevant to the subject of your site. If it isn’t you may well get lots of visitors – but they won’t find what they are looking for.

If you want more detailed information then many keyword tools are available at a price as well. The free version is generally limited, while the paid version gives you more data to work with, and can be a good bet if you intend to use it regularly to monitor the likely effectiveness of your pay per click campaigns, as well as using it to find good keywords to use on your website. Some free tools will only show you the top one hundred searches for example; you will need to pay to see everything the search found.

Remember also that several of the search terms you find might be good to use in your situation. You should then take your list of terms to the search engine you have a PPC campaign with and see how much each one would cost you if you were to make a bid on it.

Armed with all this information you can then make a good start with your pay per click campaign.