Making Money with PPC Advertising: Pros and Cons

Some internet marketers swear that Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, or Google Adwords, to be more specific, is the greatest thing in the world. And if you don't use it, you aren't running your online business correctly or marketing as efficiently as possible. While it is true that Adwords can bring you in a lot of targeted traffic to help you make money online, it isn't perfect by any means. There are pros and cons to this popular form of driving traffic to your site. In this post, I'm going to go over the positives and negatives of pay per click advertising as objectively as possible.

Let's start with the good stuff first because that's what everybody wants to hear. There is no mistaking that Adwords is one of the most targeted forms of online promotion around when it's used correctly. The concept itself is brilliant. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and comes to your site. That means that the ad attracted their attention enough to lead them to believe that the website on the other end is what they are looking for. If the ad doesn't attract their attention, it costs you nothing. Yes, on the surface, this would appear to be the perfect solution for driving the kind of traffic to your site that you will actually make money from.

Now let's take a look at the negative side of PPC. The truth is that it really doesn't have anything to do with the Google Adwords system itself, but with the way people use it. See, Adwords on the surface is very simple and easy to use. The problem comes when you actually try to use the system.

There are many areas where a person can make huge mistakes... not the least of which is the wording of the ads themselves and the keywords used to target searchers. If the keywords are too broad or general, you can end up with a LOT of clicks on your ads from people who really aren't interested in what you have to offer, and this can cost you huge amounts of money. Also, if the ads themselves are worded poorly, or worse, misleading, this can lead to clicks that don't convert into sales, which again can cost you a lot of money.

People who really know how to use the Adwords system or other similar PPC systems are the ones who make a lot of money from it. These are the people who know how to pick keywords and write compelling ads. The ones who don't will end up wasting a ton of money very quickly without getting anything in return. You need to learn as much as you can about pay per click advertising before jumping in with your first campaign. Or at least set your daily budget really low so you can test different ads until you figure out a system that works for you without going broke in the process.

Yes, PPC / Google Adwords can make you a lot of money if used correctly, but it can also put you more in debt very quickly if not done correctly.