Online Money

   Beginning with Google, and now by Yahoo! and several other companies, the internet has a brilliant advertising business model where these companies, advertisers, and website owners all benefit. Called ‘pay-per-click’ (PPC) advertising, many observers have described it as one of the most revolutionary marketing ideas ever created! I’ll explain this using the original and most successful system, Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs.

 

In a nutshell, it works like this: advertisers make their own ads through the AdWords system. They only pay Google when the ads are on the internet, and visitors click on them. The keywords that advertisers use in the ads cost a certain amount to use — anywhere from a couple of cents to as much as $15 or more, each time someone on the internet clicks on that ad. Costs per keyword are determined through a bidding process, where minimum and maximum bids are set through the process. When the customer clicks on the ad link, they are brought to the advertisers website and the products and/or services it is selling.

 

This model is great because, theoretically, traffic (and potential customers) that visit the site through these ads are there because they WANT more information about the products, and to possibly make a purchase. Compare this to television, print or radio ads, where there is a hope that the message reaches potential customers, as research marketing indicates. But it’s more of an inexact science — people may not be there for the ad, they may be confused about the ad, or they simply may not be interested in the product. Theoretically, With Google’s system, only qualified leads visit the site, because they chose to go there through the ads. (I’m sure you’ve noticed I’ve repeated ‘theoretically’ — you’ll see why!)

 

But the system doesn’t stop there. Advertising is only as effective as how many targeted people see it, on as many search engine results and websites as possible. So, Google rewards you, the owner of a website, to help them advertise these ads. Through Google’s AdSense system, Google provides a piece of website code for you to put in your page code. You can customize the look of the ads, and choose where and how they want them displayed on your site’s pages. The ads automatically appear after the code is inserted, and only ads that are relevant to your page’s content are displayed (the pages are ’spidered’ by robots that search engines use to take note of the content). Each time a visitor to your site clicks on these ads, Google pays you a percent of what the advertiser is paying them.

 

For example, Advertiser A pays Google 20 cents a click each time someone clicks on their ads. Through your AdSense account and ads on your site, Google pays you x percent of what Advertiser A is paying them, say 3 cents (all figures hypothetical). So, Advertiser A benefits, by having their ads more widely distributed throughout the net, which is key for generating awareness and sales for their product. Google, of course, benefits by collecting more advertising money from the additional clicks on the ads … and you, as the website owner displaying these ads, make money by doing practically nothing, except owning and maintaining your website!

 

The key for advertisers is, of course, to use the least-expensive keywords possible to drive traffic to their site. Your challenge as a website owner seeking to monetize the PPC system is to find high-paying keywords to include in your site’s content, so that the highest-paying ads show up using the code. Although these can be found — albeit slowly — by doing your own research on the internet, I highly suggest investing in certain programs or books in particular, that walk you through quicker, more accurate and multi-faceted ways of lowering costs and getting the most revenue.

 

This neat little system works fantastically without a hitch, in theory. But in reality, as with all things, there are little monkey wrenches that come with the territory. Read about the ying to this program’s yang — click fraud!