How To Make Money Online? This is literally the Million Dollar Question! Whether you want to make a fortune, or are simply searching for ways to earn a modest second income from home, the Internet can provide the answer. Although it is not absolutely necessary to own your own website in order to make money from online marketing, it can be a huge benefit!

With many households now owning one or more computers, sales over the internet have already reached mammoth proportions, and this is set to increase even more dramatically over the next few years. Literally almost anything can and is being bought or sold online each day, and a huge proportion of this is being done through paid search advertising via a Search Engine. Google is the biggest player in the Search Engines, followed by Yahoo and MSN. There are of course other smaller search engines but these are the 3 main ones. Whilst there are other methods of making money online and generating traffic to a website, the topic covered in this article is Pay Per Click, or PPC as it is commonly known, and is essentially for beginners in this area.

PPC can generate traffic to a website almost instantly, with the right AdWords Campaigns. AdWords is the name Google gives to what it calls sponsored search advertising, and is the platform that will be discussed here in more detail. Opening an account is easy, and then it is a matter of getting started with your advertising campaigns. Although this may seem relatively straight forward, it is however vitally important to do your research before you start.

What is it that you are trying to sell?. In order to be successful and make money online it is vital that when a prospective customer clicks on your ad he/she is taken to a webpage, or landing page which contains exactly that which you have promised. This page is called the destination URL, amd is different from the display URL, which is normally the homepage of your website. If the customer does not immediately see what he/she is looking for on the landing page they will hit the Back button on their browser, and you have lost them forever.

Keywords are the probably the most vital part of your AdWords campaign. Get this wrong and you will either get no clicks, or even worse get irrelevant clicks on your ad, and this is where a lot of money can be lost. Try to think like a prospective customer. What words would you type into the browser if you were looking to purchase this product or service over the internet? There are many good Keyword Tools that you can either get for free or buy which will suggest additional keywords.

Google provides you with a Free Keyword Tool, which will also show you estimated volumes of traffic for each keyword it suggests. When you have chosen your keywords, Google will ask you how much you would like to bid, or pay for that keyword when someone clicks on your ad. Of course the more popular the keyword the more you will have to pay for it in the beginning if you wish to be in the top few searches, or on the first page for that keyword search.

The reason I say in the beginning is because Google does not only take into account how much you pay for a keyword when it calculates what your position will be. It also takes many other factors into consideration, such as how relevant your keywords are, whether your keywords appear in your ad or not, your Click Through Rate, (CTR), and the relevancy of your landing page, as well as other factors known only to Google. In order for your campaign to be successful and actually make money online, then all of these things need to be considered.

Try not to make your keyword too “broad”. For example if you are selling a 22 carat gold wedding ring, and you use the word “ring” as a keyword, it will throw up many different kinds of ring which are not relevant. It may even show up searches such as “boxing ring” for example. In general it is better to have keywords which are at least 2 words long, and preferably 3 – 4 words or even longer.

These are called “long tail keywords”, and although they may get fewer impressions, as fewer people will be searching for them, they will be relevant to your campaign and will result in a higher CTR and ultimately more sales, or “Conversions”. Google also gives the opportunity to choose “broad”, “phrase” or “exact” match keywords, and also to add “negative” keywords, but this will be discussed in a later article, as well as writing your ad copy.