Eric Edelstein

If you go to google the page is divided into 2 sections.

On the left is the organic listings, which means you don’t pay to get your site to show up there (unless you pay a search engine optimisation firm to try get you there)

On the right (and sometimes above the organic listings) is the sponsored listings (also known as paid listings or pay per click listings).

With pay per click, the name says it all - everytime someone clicks on your description of your website, and goes through to your website (the click), you pay the owner of the pay per click website a certain amount of money (the pay).

Overture used to be the largest pay per click search engine in the world, but a few years ago it was bought out by Yahoo, and although still pretty big (it’s the second large pay per click site in the world at the moment) google has overtaken yahoo to become the biggest pay per click engine.

With google, one of the advantages is you can display your advert to people from a specific country - so if you only want South African’s to see your advert (which would mean only paying for South African’s clicking on your ad and visiting your site) then you can specify this in the settings.

With google, the higher you are doesn’t only result from how much you are paying as they also factor in how many people have clicked your ad in the past (the relevancy).

The combination of how much you pay multipled by your relevancy score results in where and when you appear on the google sponsored listings.

If you have mastered google pay per click, then try some of the other international or local search engines which have a pay per click component. (International pay per click - msn, yahoo, South African pay per click search engines - funnel, 24.com)

There are plenty smaller pay per click engines that are looking to “take” your hard earned marketing budget, promising unbelievable deals - be VERY careful when you use them as most of them have low quality visitors or dodgy traffic (you might get lots of “visitors” to your website cheaply, but you’ll find none of them buy anything from you or contact you).

If you’re running a large pay per click campaign of thousands or hundreds of thousands of different keywords, then consider using a pay per click search marketing company to manage your campaign for you.

And if you want to manage the pay per click campaigns yourself, consider using some keyword software such as wordtracker.com (or google lets you do keyword research in your google adwords account) to let you find new and better keywords to bid on.