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You've spent countless hours and dollars planning, designing and building your web site. You're ready for a constant flow of prospects. So how do you get them there?

You've got 3 choices:

' You lead them to your site. You can do this with online links and offline referrals. This method should be part of your strategy but in most cases it won't yield significant traffic.

' Prospects find your site through traditional search engines. This can be extremely effective if you understand meta tags, static web pages, crawler pages, and inbound links and can secure top positions. Most business owners don't, and outsourcing the task can easily cost thousands of dollars.

' You pay for traffic. This is commonly referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and could prove to be extremely profitable. It requires you to bid on a 'per-click' basis for specific words/phrases you think interest your prospects.

The two leading pay-per-click search engines are Google Adwords and Overture. Because they generate an extremely large amount of traffic, every business owner should explore the viability of using both of them. Here's why:

1. You don't have to change your existing web pages

Unlike the traditional search engines where you must constantly change and 'tweak' your site content, page tags, and online strategies, you don't need to change anything to get traffic from the PPC search engines.

2. The pay-per-click process is easy to set-up

No experience or knowledge of computers, software or coding is required. None. Once you visit the sites and set up your account, every step of the process is simple and easy-to-follow, and written instructions are provided if needed, as is help from customer service (but I guarantee you won't need it).

3. The initial investment is very low

You can set up an account on either of the sites for about $50. I would recommend you invest a few hundred dollars to fully evaluate the program, and once you do that you will have a true picture of the PPC landscape.

4. You get the opportunity to target prospects

When you bid on a specific keyword/phrase, you also create a short written description for your offering. Here's a chance to attract visitors who are looking for what you offer and hopefully disqualify everyone else, eliminating the click-throughs that would have cost you money.

5. You get instant traffic

You might have traffic literally within minutes of setting up your account, depending on your keywords and bids. It might take a few weeks to deplete your entire deposit, but you'll certainly get clicks right away.

6. Results are easy to track

Both search engines provide excellent reports and analytical tools, but even if you keep a handwritten report, it's easy to measure your ROI with the PPC search engines.

Pay-per-click is not a guaranteed profit center for every business. The reality is if you've chosen high-traffic keywords, you will probably be in a bidding war with your competitors. But for a minimal investment, any business can accurately evaluate the validity of PPC advertising as a marketing strategy.