In this age of speed dialing, T1 lines and other forms of high-tech instant gratification, many webmasters find themselves tempted to engage in pay-per-click advertising. After all, if you’ve just designed a state-of-the-art website, there’s nothing quite as gratifying as a steady stream of traffic right from start. Webmasters with open wallets have found that pay-per-click can provide traffic within hours or even minutes of a website’s launch.

Pay-per-click Pros

Before considering perils and pitfalls of pay-per-click, it’s worthwhile to remember that in some instances, pay-per-click is a good market strategy. A number of reputable SEO firms combine pay-per-click management with search engine optimization as a method of getting their clients clicks they need. Pay-per-click can be an especially effective strategy for:

•companies trying to beat a competitor to market with a new product who want to garner substantial traffic while waiting for their SEO efforts to kick in •webmasters with deep pockets who are more concerned about establishing a quick presence than long-term return on investment •webmasters who are reaping a return on investment high enough to justify expenditures on pay-per-click

Significant Drawbacks

Although there are valid reasons to engage in pay-per-click advertising campaigns, there are also enough drawbacks to give any webmaster pause.

Companies considering pay-per-click need to determine primary purpose of their marketing campaign—whether it be immediate sales, building website value, or a combination of two. If immediate sales is goal and a worthwhile return on investment is being achieved, pay-per-click may be strategy of choice—at least until good search engine positioning can be obtained.

Webmasters seeking to build a valuable web-based business should remember that whenever money “spigot” for pay-per-click stops, so do clicks. In contrast, clicks resulting from an investment in search engine optimization will continue for months and possibly years to come.

Monitoring ROI

Amid all noise and hype on Internet today, not many people realize that all ideas and techniques you can find are petty much useless if you don't first understand your business model. In other words, even most amazing Internet marketing technique will not work if you don't understand how to apply it to YOUR business.

The 3 most popular business models are:

1) Affiliate Marketing

This is perhaps most popular one out there, since there are absolutely no barriers to entry. Almost anyone can sign-up for an affiliate program for free and start promoting product or service on Internet with hopes that someone will buy, giving them instant commissions. Affiliate marketers don't carry any risk, since they do not pay for creation of product, they do not handle customer service and they do not need any up-front investments.

When you consider that those are top three things people want to avoid, it's no surprise that almost everyone and their neighbor promotes an affiliate program or another. In fact, if there is a single reason why Internet today is so proliferated with ads and banners, it's because of affiliate programs.

Even though there are so many affiliate marketers out there, only 5% ever make any money and only 1% makes big money. The "Super Affiliates" do it very differently from all other millions; therefore they earn big checks.

You can get a good idea of how to be a good affiliate marketer here: http://affiliatemarketing.sitesell.com/globalmillionaire.html

2) E-book and Information Publishing

Sitting at other end of spectrum, e-book authors need to be more disciplined in their approach to Internet marketing. Of course, they also need to invest more than affiliates do. While affiliates can get away trying to "get something for nothing" same is not true for e-book type of business.

If you're thinking about publishing and selling your own e-book online, and you think it's going to be easy, think again. You'll need to learn a lot more than affiliates are required to. You'll need to spend some amount of money getting your business up and running. However, when you do it right, payoff in this online business model is much more rewarding.

The reason why e-book marketers and "Infopreneurs" make more money is simple; they have very, very low production and maintenance costs. Anything digital doesn't cost a single cent to be produced in millions if necessary. Whatever initial start-up costs spent can be covered by selling just a few copies of high-margin e-books, and you can even recruit an army of affiliates who are more than willing to do all selling for you.