Due to amount of submissions that Search Engines receive, it takes from 2 days to 3 months for your site to show up, depending on Engine. Paid Listings are an option for site owners who want to build visibility quickly. This form of search engine advertising means that you can be guaranteed to appear in top results for terms you are interested in, usually within days.

So you better start submitting today, it will be worth it; by hand or done by a professional service for a small fee; make sure YOUR web site is in World’s Yellow Pages!

How Much Do I Bid?

The bigger PPC engines such as Goto and Sprinks require a minimum bid of $0.05. Startup engines have lesser minimums of $0.01.

How much to bid depends on your return-on-investment (ROI) calculations.

For example: If you bid $1.00 per visitor, and 1 in every 10 visitors buys your product, your cost-per-sale is $10.00.

So if each sale of your product produces a gross profit of $15, then your net profit will be $5.00 ($15 gross profit minus $10 cost-per-sale).

Your return-on-investment (ROI), before non-marketing expenses, is 50.0% ($5.00 net profit / $10 cost-per-sale). Always price your bids to achieve a positive ROI!

A great tool that you can use to compare bids for a specific keyword across multiple PPC engines is at http://www.compareyourclicks.com

To read about how you can maximize your returns from PPC engines, go to http://internetmarketingfocus.com/article.php?sid=53

You'll learn how to reduce your bids while still maintaining same ranking or get a top 3 position for maybe just 1 cent more!

How Do I Track Clicks?

Most of time, you'll notice that number of clicks tracked by yourself is between 15% to 30% more than clicks PPC engine reports.

This is because reputable PPC engines such as Overture have installed anti-cheating mechanisms that prevent your competitors from repeatedly clicking on your listings and wasting your bid fees!

They will count multiple clicks within a specified timeframe from same computer as only one clickthrough while your own log will usually register multiple clicks.

There was once when I noticed that my log was registering less clicks than Overture's reports. They were experiencing some bug which prevented clicks from being properly delivered to advertiser's website.

Because I was tracking my clicks, I notified them of problem and they credited my account for bad clicks. Tracking your clicks give you a more reliable picture of how well your PPC campaign is performing.

If you have access to your CGI directory, I recommend LnkinLite, a small yet powerful tracking software that can track clicks to your site in background. Get it at http://www.dtp-aus.com/cgiscript/lnkinlte.shtml

Otherwise you can consider free online trackers at http://www.hypertracker.com or http://www.linkcounter.com