Whatever the nature of your work from home business, we all have one major task in common – advertising. In an ideal world, you customers and clients will find you with ease wherever they look, both online and offline. After exploring your website or getting in touch, they’ll place order and help to drive your revenue.But some of the best businesses in the world fail because they simply do not invest in quality advertising. What use is a product or service that nobody knows about?The Internet is a powerful marketing tool, and the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising model makes global advertising accessible, understandable and affordable for all.Read on to get an overview of what PPC advertising involves, why it works so well, and how you can get started with a Pay Per Click campaign today.Pay For Relevant Business Leads, Not Random VisibilityThe most traditional form of advertising in the world is the newspaper campaign. When the Madison Avenue marketing experts placed adverts in national publications, they could be confident that they would be seen by hundreds of thousands of readers.In its earliest forms, online advertising adopted a similar approach. High traffic websites and search engines would charge businesses for exposure, for example showing a banner advert to 10,000 visitors.But are these visitors interested in your products and services? With a per-impression campaign, there is simply no way of knowing. As a result, advertisers are charged fees for campaigns that may not attract a single interested customer.Modern online advertising addresses this through the Pay Per Click model, or PPC. Instead of paying for exposure, advertisers are charged for each time an advert is clicked. Although there is no way to account for inquisitiveness and clicks from visitors who have no intention of making a purchase, this generally means that you will only pay for traffic from people who are genuinely interested in what you do.Once they’re on your website, these are the people that you can convert into customers.How Does PPC Advertising Work?The best way to understand how PPC advertising works is to follow an imaginary advert through the process. Let’s imagine that you run a website which sells products for babies and toddlers.First, you will create a campaign. This includes the adverts that you wish to display, as well as a range of settings including geographic locations or times of the day in which to show the advert. You can also configure a campaign to show adverts on specific devices – for example, an advert that is tailored for display on smartphones.In the case of search engine PPC advertising, the adverts in your campaign are then associated with keywords. When a web user types this phrase into the search engine, your advert will be shown – but only if you can afford it.Usually, advertisers bid for clicks. You could be willing to pay 50 pence, while a competitor has offered 75 pence. In this case, your competitor’s advert would be shown before yours. If you do not bid enough for your chosen keywords, your advert will not be displayed at all.Alternatively, most PPC systems allow you to simply define a daily budget for your campaign and have the service provider automatically bid on your behalf. This is the ideal solution for most advertisers.In either case, when an advert is clicked, you are charged. The process repeats until your pre-defined budget is depleted.Getting Started With PPC Using Google AdWordsWithout a doubt, Google AdWords is the single largest pay per click advertising platform on the web. If you only use PPC through one provider, it should be Google.Every day, millions of people search Google for different products and services. Customers are now more likely to turn to Google for advice and information about purchases than they are any other outlet.Make sure that your business is there!An important consideration for Google AdWords is the quality of your pages and the preciseness of your campaign. Remember that as well as offering PPC advertising, Google has access to an advanced algorithm that can determine the relevance and quality of your page. If you are to be successful with AdWords, you need to combine a high quality page with the right budget.For the best results, don’t use one overarching advert that applies to your entire website. Instead, spend a few hours creating individual ads that target very specific sections, or even specific products.Returning to our imaginary website that offers baby and toddler products, a great campaign would be organised hierarchically in-line with your product categories.An extract from the Ad Groups in your Campaign could be:Baby Products High Chairs
Potties
Teethers
Toys
Books Each of these sections would have its own adverts and link the customer to the correct page of your website, not just the homepage. You can then target just a few carefully selected keywords with an increased chance of getting a high position in the results page.For more advice on using Google AdWords, the official Google website is a fantastic source of information. They provide everything from getting started guides to advanced video tutorials, and can even offer hands-on advice over the phone to paying advertisers. For more information, visit support.google.com/adwords/.Search Engine Pay Per Click with BingMicrosoft’s Bing is a rapidly growing search engine with a PPC advertising service to match.For the most part, Bing Ads works in the same way as Google AdWords. You will create advertisements divided into groups, associate them with keywords, and use manual or automatic bidding to determine when your advert is shown.However, Bing uses a monthly billing process that can sometimes make it more difficult to keep track of your advertising spend in advance. Google, on the other hand, allows you to ‘top up’ your advertising account, restricting your spend to the funds that you have already deposited.That said, Bing represents an interesting opportunity for advertisers. Although the site can never rival the traffic of Google, the uptake on Bing advertising is still in its infancy. That means that, with less competition, the cost of clicks on even the most popular keywords is lower than at Google.Search Engine PPC Extends Far Beyond Search EnginesIt is surprising to find that most people who use pay per click advertising for their business on search engines do not realise that their adverts can be seen in a wide variety of places.While it is true that the bulk of your traffic will come from adverts displayed in search engine results, you can also configure Google AdWords or Bing Ads to display your adverts on external websites. Anybody can install an advert panel on their homepage as a source of extra income and, if you opt-in to the display network, your advert could be displayed just about anywhere.PPC Advertising In The World of Social MediaIf there is any website that is used more frequently than a search engine, it is Facebook. Facebook spearheaded the growth of social media and, with more than a billion users, represents a viable advertising opportunity for any businesses.Advertising on Facebook starts with your Page, which is free to create. This is where you post updates about your business and engage with your fans and customers.From this page, though, you can also engage Facebook’s new pay per click system. You can create adverts that lead to your Page or a particular post, and then select either an impressions-based payment scheme, or a PPC alternative (known on Facebook as CPC, or Cost Per Click).You can then decide who your advert will be shown to, based on anything from Interests listed in people’s Facebook pages to people who have just got engaged. In the case of our imaginary baby and toddler website, we could select the ‘Expecting Parents’ category to target with our ads.Facebook offers a highly targeted kind of pay per click advertising that could well represent the future of marketing. With such personal information on display throughout the Facebook system, it is easier than ever to connect with those people who genuinely want and need what you have to offer.