PayPerClick or PPC is a way to advertise to a specific group of people who are searching for your information using keywords or a keyword phrase. It’s called Pay Per Click because you, as a business owner, only pay for the advertisement when someone clicks on it.

The clicks are good because they’re clicking on your URL and heading on over to your website where you can close the sale and make a profit.

There are different PPC programs through various search engines and companies however the most popular PPC service is Google AdWords.

It’s free to participate in AdWords however, before you head over to Google to sign up there are a few questions you’ll want to answer including:

1. How many people are looking for your products or services? Keyword tools will help you find this information and it’s key to creating an effective PPC campaign.

2. How much will your click’s cost? Google’s traffic estimator will tell you how much it’ll cost you each time someone clicks on your ad. This is important because you can quickly spend thousands of dollars and if that’s not in your budget you need to design your campaign carefully.

3. Who are your competitors? Using Google, search for your keywords and pay attention to the ads that pop up in the right hand column of your search results. These are your competition. Study them carefully. Scan through the first couple of pages. When you see an ad that’s a repeat, you’ve gone through your competition. If there are more than 50 ads, you may want to reconsider a PPC campaign with those keywords.

Setting Up Your First Ad

Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to include in your ad, it’s time to write your first PPC ad. AdWords has a strict character limit. You get 25 keywords for your headline, 35 each for the next two lines of text, and then your URL. This means it’s time to get creative. You want a headline that captures attention and hopefully promises a benefit and then two sentences that inspire curiosity, evoke emotion, and motivate clicks through to your website.

Each PPC ad you create will be optimized for keywords and should thus send readers to a relevant web page. If, for example, you have a PPC ad selling a dog training eBook and people who click through land on a page that sells dog care information you’re not going to have the same conversion rate as if you sent them directly to a sales page for that dog training eBook.

Once your ad is written, the rest is easy. Simply log onto or create your Google AdWords account and follow the steps. Set your budget low, you can always adjust it, create your ad, enter your billing information and you’re good to go. Oh, one final thing. Track the success of your PPC ads. You can fine tune them for optimal results, delete them and start over or add to your campaign.

Twitter has become not only a great site for connecting with people around the world, it’s become a favorite tool of internet marketers because:

• They can offer tidbits of valuable information to a huge audience.
• They can connect with prospects and customers on a personal level
• They can glean market and industry information from tweets

The trick is to know if your tweets are having a direct effect on your profits. The trick, is to track your tweets. Fortunately, because developers know how important Twitter is to marketers, they’ve developed several tools to track tweets. Here are just a few ways to track your tweets:

#1 A standard calendar and an analytics program. The most basic way to track tweets is to record when and what you tweet on a calendar. You can of course use a print calendar however, you can also track them on a calendar like Outlook or Google. Once a week, compare your tweets to your analytics data to see which tweets generated traffic. This way you can determine to a reasonable degree, which tweets make the biggest impact and what days or times of the day are more effective. You can also link to unique web pages in your tweets to make sure you’re evaluating the right information.

#2 Twistory – Puts your twitter feed into a calendar so you can see your twitter history. It essentially automates what you’re doing in #1.

#3 TweetEffect tracks what tweets gain followers for you and what tweets essentially cost you followers.

#4 Tweetie is an iPhone application that lets you track your tweets. You can view and respond to the tweets you follow, post your own tweets, and search for tweets by keyword just like you would from your computer only better because you can do it on the go.

#5 Twitoaster is a service that monitors twitter conversations. It works by simply aggregating the conversations and publishing relevant statistics.

#6 Viralheat. Viralheat is a paid service with membership levels based on your needs. Starting at $9.99 a month,“Viralheat allows you to monitor, analyze and glean insights at blazing speeds.”

#7 Of course there are dozens of other twitter tracking services including sites like TweetLater and HootSuite that let you schedule posts and track mentions and followers.

Finding the service or software that’s right for you may take a little trial and error. Of course, if you’re looking to simply track your tweets and the positive effect they have on your business, the five mentioned above are a good place to start.