When you spend as much of your time dealing with wholesale industry professionals like I do it is easy to forget that many people who visit Top Ten Wholesale and Wholesale U are just getting started in the business. It is easy to forget that many of the terms and concepts that are very familiar to the veteran are a complete mystery to the noxiously termed “newbie”.

In the spirit of offering a helping hand to those just getting started in the e-commerce world I like to offer up an occasional primer on some very basic aspect of the trade. Today’s entry; Pay per click advertising.

One of the biggest and most frustrating hurdles for the new e-commerce site to overcome is after all the web site construction is done and the shopping carts installed and filled with shiny new products getting people to come. There are millions of web sites out there and standing out can be extremely difficult.

A way to improve traffic is to enroll in a pay-per-click search engine. The most famous example probably being Google Adwords, a systems used by millions of online businesses, but Yahoo’s Search Marketing isn’t far behind. The engines will charge you a very small fee per visit they generate for your web site. Usually you will bid against other customers for position on the site. The higher your bid the better position you will get.

You should expect to pay fees ranging from a few cents to around a dollar per click depending on the keywords you want your ad to appear with. Pay-per-click ads are among the very best ways to increase traffic to your website, proper bids and a well constructed ad will almost certainly improve your web pages traffic numbers.

In brief, an advertiser simply sets up a pay per click account with the search engine they wish to advertise on and fill out an automated form with the text that constitutes their ad. They then place bids on the key words that relate to the particular product or service they offer. The key words are the search terms that browsers are likely to use in order to find what they are looking for and the bid is the amount the advertiser is willing to pay for every click their ad receives.

How high the bidder goes determines how highly placed their ad will appear amongst the sponsored links that are returned with the search and generally appear either in a side column or at the top of a page of search results. Most advertisers use a key word digger or similar tool to determine the most searched for key words. Key word tools can be found online and most pay per click search engines offer some kind of digging tool for their customers to use.

For example, The Burly Brothers Moving Company might choose to bid on several sets of keywords such as movers, moving companies, and furniture movers. The amount they will need to bid on their key words depends on how popular the key word is and how high a placement they desire and can afford.

To continue with our example let’s assume the Burly Brothers determine that the present highest bid, thus the highest position for the search term moving companies is $.50 per click and the next position is $.40 per click. The new advertiser figures that the second position is good enough and places a bid of $.45 per click. They will now occupy the second position and bump the $.40 bid to the third placement. It should be noted that in most cases, as long as the $.40 bid is not raised, the Burly Brothers would not have to pay the full $.45 they bid. They would only pay enough to top the lower bid, in this instance $.41.

While pay per click ads are not guarantees of success, given the highly competitive nature of the online business world, it is naive to think that just because you have built a website that visitors will come.