By John Alexander

For years I avoided Pay Per Click simply because I could get all the traffic I needed in the natural rankings without paying for it.

But eventually I discovered that there were some nice advantages for doing PPC for some clients.

Traditionally when we think of Pay Per Click, we are usually referring to Google Adwords or else perhaps, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture.) Then there are also other newer PPC systems such as Microsoft's Ad Center. Besides these big well known PPC opportunities, there we still have many other smaller ones such as Findwhat, Espotting and many others.

Now Pay Per Click advertising is not really search engine optimization, but its more in the league of "paid advertising." While many of our Workshop students come to class to learn how to lower their PPC costs or eliminate them to gain new visibility in the organic rankings, we also teach on Pay Per Click (for those who need to learn how to lower their cost per lead or manage their campaign's effectively.)

However, for this article, I wanted to touch on yet another alternative to "traditional PPC" along with offering you a a few tips for getting started.

So let's talk about a PPC marketplace that has nothing to do with search engines at all.

Its a little bit different and one of the advantages is that you can pick and choose a campaign based on geo-targeting and certain other interesting demographics. In this type of PPC you can choose to place your text ad or your banner advertising on literally hundreds or even thousands of Web sites.

Question: Is this the same thing as buying "text links" someone may ask?

Answer: No, it is not. It actually about buying advertising space on literally thousands of Web sites where your ad will get millions of impressions (often at a much less expensive rate than traditional PPC.) Does this replace traditional Pay Per Click marketing on the search engines? Definitely not. Nor does it replace the exposure you can get using good search engine marketing skills for creating high performance information pages that at the rank top of of the results the natural way.

So then why even talk about it or discuss it?

It is just something else that you can do on top of everything else even if you are just learning SEO skills or just getting started optimizing your Web site.