Every marketer needs traffic, so you can either get it for free, or pay for it. For our purposes, we'll only be talking about PPC advertising, or pay per click. PPC has attracted millions of marketers over the years with the lure of instant traffic that is highly targeted. It's a straightforward advertising concept: you only pay for your traffic, in other words - only when a surfer clicks on one of your ads.

Your job is to make sure the traffic your ad generates converts. Overall, it's really not as simple as it appears. It has become fairly involved for many reasons, and some of those have to do with the high competition. It's no secret that very many people have earned a ton 'o money via ppc advertising. Of course there are risks, and of course you can lose a lot of money if you're not careful. So you need to have some education about it, proper research, and planning so you don't lose your shirt and can actually make money. We'll be sharing some PPC strategies and tips to help get you on your way.

When setting up your campaigns, it's important to check out all the different keyword/phrases variations you can find. Thorough and extensive keyword research is imperative as is choosing the right matching phrases categories. You'll be using categories such as broad, exact, and phrase match keywords - make sure you know the difference. Your ads will be displayed for broad match keywords when similar phrases but different variations are used that contain your keywords. When you have keywords grouped in exact phrase match, your ads are shown when people use that exact phrase as yours. Besides that, using negative match keywords can be used to stop your ad from showing up for the keywords you want to exclude.

Always mention product benefits in your PPC ads. The will help your CTR, click through rate. You'll find a still better CTR if you include benefits in your ads. People need to feel like they're getting the most out of a deal, whether they are or not, but if they feel they are... then you'll usually make the sale.

Until you get a lot of experience, stick to the more cheaper keywords when you bid on them. The expensive keywords means the competition is brutally tough, so wait until you have more PPC time under your belt.

You should have the profit margin of your product in mind when bidding for keywords, so that you don't go for any overpriced keywords. If you bid on expensive keywords, you can get into trouble real fast.