Pay per click (or PPC for short) is a type of online advertising where you only pay when somebody clicks on your advertisement. Along with search engine optimization (SEO), it's one of the major methods affiliates can use to get traffic to their websites.

A pay-per-click ad is a small, four-line ad consisting of a headline, two short lines of text and a URL. It doesn't contain graphics, color variations, music or video, and you can't pay extra to get more space. Although they sound and look rather basic, PPC ads are one of the most powerful ways of advertising online because they are so targeted.

Rather than just displaying to whomever happens to be in the vicinity, as with TV or billboard advertising, pay-per-click ads only display to people who have shown an active interest in the topic by either searching for related information, or by going one step further and visiting a website. What this means for you as an affiliate is that your chances of success are higher than if you were using another type of advertising.

Another enormous benefit is that you only pay for the times when someone clicks on the ad. While that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get a sale, it's a lot better than paying merely for the privilege of having your ads show somewhere (called pay-per-impression), which was the norm before pay-per-click was introduced.

In this section of Affilorama, you'll learn our essentials for making PPC work, including:

• Keywords – how to find profitable keywords and how to categorize them.
• How to write an exciting and compelling ad.
• Ad placement — How to get your ad ranking in the top four positions for maximum exposure.
• How to design your landing page (the page your ad links to) to win maximum brownie points with the search engines.
• How to track your conversions so you can learn which ads are doing well and which ones aren't.