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About 10 years ago, a new type of search engine surfaced on the Internet scene.  It was a way that you could buy yourself into the top of the search engine rankings in a bidding fashion.  This came to be known as pay per click marketing and it wasn’t long before all of the search engines adopted this style of advertising.  When many people think about this type of advertising, they think about the Google Adwords system.  The fact of the matter is, Google is only one of the ways that you can receive traffic in this fashion.  If you use it effectively, however, they can send you more traffic than anyone else.

It was such an easy thing to find some keywords with low competition, throw up a page that pointed to an affiliate program and buy an ad through the pay per click marketing systems.  Not all that long ago, however, something happened that dramatically changed the scene of this kind of advertising.  It is usually known as the Google slap, a time in which people saw their rankings in pay per click marketing drop dramatically overnight.  Not only did they drop quickly, they continued to drop consistently for a long period of time.  Why is this?

Google began to institute a new policy that was known as the quality score.  Although they had used the quality score before this time, they really began to put it into effect and that is what caused the Google slap to occur.  As it turns out, Google didn’t want a lot of affiliate programs cluttering up their advertising space.  Their claim is to be interested in quality content and this also included their ads.  If the advertisement or the keyword did not fit in well with the webpage to which it was pointing, you either lost your ranking power or your minimum bid was raised to such a high level that you could never afford it.  It seemed that this was the death of affiliate marketing using pay per click advertising.  Is that really the case?

Actually, it is easier now to make money with pay per click marketing and affiliate advertising than it was before.  Not that it takes less work, but there is much less competition to worry about.  All that is really necessary is for you to put up a page that is relevant to what you are trying to offer.  You can do so in the way of a review article for the product that you are associated with.  Simply point your Google ad to this page and you should rank well while only paying out a minimum bid.

The two things that you are going to need whenever you do this kind of advertising are patience and a desire to stick to it.  Not every ad campaign that you’re going to run will be a success.  Enough of them will work, however, to make it well worth your while.

One mistake that most people tend to make at some point in their Internet marketing career is lumping all forms of advertising into one particular mold.  This is often done in the case of pay per click marketing.  People are aware that absolute fortunes are being made through the Google Adwords system, so they naturally think that any pay per click marketing system will work wonders for their business.  Is this the case?  Let’s take a look at a few of the pay per click marketing systems that are available online and see which ones will do the most for your business.

Of course, the king of all pay per click marketing systems is run by Google.  It is their Adwords system that drives the entire process.  Once you choose your relevant keywords and ads that go into the system, they will almost immediately be displayed alongside the search engine result pages.  Not only that, you also have the choice of whether to display them on millions of websites around the world through the Google Adsense system.  This can get your website a lot of exposure and traffic in a short period of time.  If used correctly, it can make your business an almost immediate success.

The second on the list of pay per click marketing systems is Yahoo search marketing or YSM for short.  This is also advertising that is available through a very reputable source and you can receive a decent amount of traffic by using this system as well.  YSM tends to be a little bit more difficult to understand than the AdWords system but once you get the hang of it, it is easy to add keywords or change your ads and manage your entire campaign online.  Even though they don’t send as much traffic as Google, you still get some very qualified clicks by using this program.

A newcomer on to the pay per click marketing scene is MSN.  Their system still has, in my opinion, some bugs that need to be worked out in order for it to be truly user-friendly.  It still is not a system, however, that should be overlooked if you are serious about your pay per click marketing efforts.  Although MSN receives a small share of searchers in comparison with Google and Yahoo, they do tend to be those that purchase more readily.  If you have the time to learn it, the system can send you some qualified traffic on a consistent basis.

Finally, we have all of the other pay per click marketing systems that are available. Many of the systems will not send you much traffic, if any at all and many of them are riddled with click fraud problems.  There are a few in there, however, that can send you the traffic that you need but these take a distant backseat to the big three.  If you have the time for it and the budget, they are worth doing some experimenting.