If you’re new to Internet marketing, then you’re probably a bit overwhelmed by all the different options you have for promoting your brand. From banner ads to text links, sponsored blog posts, and old school pop-ups, there are a lot of different ways to advertise online, and all of them have their positive and negative points. But one of the most popular, effective, and affordable ways to get your product or service noticed is to use a pay per click (PPC) model. Here’s a short list of some of the best sites and programs available.
Nobody can talk about the best pay per click sites without mentioning Google. Google AdWords is far and away the number one PPC program out there, so it’s definitely worth your while to figure out how this works. One of the major factors in determining what the best pay per click sites are is overall traffic, and in this regard, Google trumps them all. This of course makes AdWords popular with marketers, and makes the bidding wars for top keywords pretty fierce. Before jumping in with an all-out campaign, it would be a good idea to read some AdWords strategy guides to see how the big boys play the game.
Trailing closely behind Google AdWords on the unofficial list of the best pay per click sites are Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo’s PPC program is called Search Marketing, while the MSN entry is called AdCenter. Both the Yahoo and MSN search engine pull an extremely high volume of traffic, and most experienced marketers would agree that the quality of visitors from these sites is much better than at Google. In other words, the people clicking on your ads are actually interested in buying, which is of course the ultimate goal here.
After the Big Three, there’s a steep dropoff in search traffic volume for the rest of these best pay per click sites. But there’s still a sufficient number of visitors to make getting acquainted with these other programs worth your time, especially if you’d like to feel your way around the whole PPC scene before taking the plunge with Google, Yahoo, or MSN. To get an idea of how PPC works on a smaller scale, you can try Marchex AdHere, MIVA, ABC Search, and SearchFeed, just to name a few. All operate under the same general principles, so don’t worry about the learning curve for the different programs.
Making the decision to participate in a PPC advertising campaign in a good one, as this model has been proven to be highly effective in attracting potential customers to your site. Now that you know what some of the best pay per click programs are, you can spend your marketing dollars in a way that’s more likely to yield terrific results!