The key advantage of pay per click marketing is you can register dozen, even hundreds of keywords that will bring up your site at the top of different results lists. That way you can promote many minor keywords that get minimal response without having to pay for them until they perform. The downside to pay per click marketing is that common lead-generating keywords are well known in the industry. The competition for keywords, especially from portals with deeper advertising pockets than small or medium businesses, tends to drive up the price advertisers will bid for an essential keyword. This can quickly break a small company with endless clicks, so be careful.

One of the quickest ways to pull lots of prospective customers to your website is to get listed prominently in search engines. However, with billions of web pages catalogued by search engines globally, your site can easily get lost in the crowd. For a fee, pay per click marketing programs like Google AdSense and Yahoo! Search Marketing places your URL higher in the ranking. This will get you the traffic you need.

Pay per click marketing works this way: Publishers or webmasters open an account, make a initial minimum deposit as a starting balance, enter their site's URL, title and description and bid on relevant keywords. Publishers then insert a java script into their web site. Each time the page is displayed, the java script pulls advertisements from these programs. These ads are targeted and related to the content contained on the web page serving the ad. When a visitor searches for the targeted keyword on the search engine where they have an account, the details of their site, including the URL appears under the section named "Sponsored Links".

Ideally, these visitors are "qualified leads" by the fact that they searched for your specific search terms. The largest search engines accept paid and free listings. Some pay-per-click search engines only list websites willing to pay for their placement, so most if not all of the listed websites are about products or services, not informational sites such as schools, government, charities, or nonprofits. That's one reason why pay per click marketing tends to deliver genuine prospects. The fact remains that it is possible for you to receive many clickthroughs to you site and not make any sales. Overall ppc search engines are the way to go but you must be diligent about watching your progress.