PPC – Pay Per Click

I think this is pretty self explanatory.  In short, an advertiser pays a website owner only when someone actually clicks on their ad and gets to their website.

But there are actually TWO  SIDES to this coin. I haven’t seen a good discussion of it from both angles:

As a Website Owner (with sufficient traffic to your website) you can gain income by posting ads on your website.  The easiest way to get started is by using Google AdSense.  You’ll notice that next to the weather information here on the site there’s a little advertisement.  Should something there catch your eye and you click on it, I actually earn a small portion of the price that the advertiser paid Google to run the ad.

Should your website draw thousands of visitors per month, then you can start charging for ads all by yourself.

As an Advertiser you will need to seek out a place to run the ads for your product or business and choose the relevant places to do so.  The most obvious being Google AdWords.  You need to pick the keywords under which your ad will appear and then decide how much to spend each time someone clicks on your ad and is taken to your website or goes to your affiliate link.

The key to decide how much to spend without going broke is to determine what your profit is per visitor.  This is called your CPC or Cost Per Click.