Many aspiring Pay-per-click marketers hear about the potential riches of PPC marketing and jump in head-first without doing the appropriate research. They sink a couple hundred dollars into one or two campaigns and they get no leads at all. Dismayed at losing money, they give up and quit, never to try PPC advertising again.

There are several steps you must master before you can become profitable with PPC. It is not a matter of throwing up something in ten minutes and seeing what works. You will need to research and implement each part of the process properly, otherwise your campaign will not succeed.

Your first step should be to choose a product to advertise. Jot down a list of ideas that you are interested in. This is important because if you aren’t interested in it, you won’t follow through with all the subsequent steps.

Next, you need to find products with affiliate programs in the topics that you wrote down. Affiliate products pay you a certain percentage every time you sell that product. The best places to find these products include clickbank.com, cj.com, linkshare.com, and e-junkie.com. There are thousands of other sites to try as well, so just look around.

Next you will need to begin with some keyword research. There are some really good paid keyword research tools like KeywordSpy and Wordtracker, but I would first recommend starting off with a free one like the Google Adwords Keyword Research tool. Using this tool, you can type in keywords related to your niche, and it will return you a bigger list of related keywords. You will then want to filter down this list by just adding the keywords that you think potential customers will be using to find a product like yours.

Now you will want to design a landing page for your product. A landing page is the site that potential customers will visit when they click on your ad. You want it to be compelling and persuasive so that it gets your visitors into a buying state of mind. If you don’t have the skills to create one yourself, you can find numerous companies on online that will create one for you for a fee.

The next step is to create your pay per click campaign. The big three places to use are Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing. All three have their strengths and weaknesses. I would suggest Google Adwords to start, since you will get the most clicks with them, but they are more stringent in terms of getting campaigns accepted.

Creating good ad copy is another essential part of the process. Your ads need to be targeted to the keywords you’ve chosen and also be compelling enough so that searchers want to click through. Achieving a high click through rate is essential for success with Google Adwords so it is important that you focus on writing good ads.

You should now have a good idea of the steps to creating a successful PPC campaign. There are definitely some more tips and tricks to be learned, but you at least now know the basics. Try starting a few PPC campaigns now and see if you can’t find your first profitable one.