So you've built your site. You've uploaded it, checked your pages, submitted your URL to 50,000,000,000,000,000 search engines, link lists and directories, signed up for a banner exchange and told all your friends about your site. And now it's been weeks with hardly any traffic. Now what?

The fact is, that unknown to most website owners, most search engines take up to 6 weeks to even index your site's URL. A lot of them take more time than that: some can take up to six months before your page will begin showing up in searches. This is of course assuming you're a search engine guru and can get to the top of the list. Then, there's the matter of targeting your traffic. How do you make sure the traffic you get is the traffic you want?

These days, when it comes to getting targeted search engine traffic on demand, many website owners have been taking a different approach - Pay-Per-Click search engines. Pay-Per-Click search engines -- known also as "pay-per-placement", "paid position", or PPC search engines -- have quickly become one of the most popular methods to get

low-cost visitors to your profit-based website almost instantly -- without waiting to be indexed, without having to be a search engine wizard, and without paying out tons of money to do it.

The PPC surge surfaced in 1998 with GoTo.Com, and by 2001 had quickly expanded to tens of thousands of established PPC engines, covering everything from your general search to music, antique furniture - even other search engines. Today, the trend continues as millions of webmasters turn to PPCs to deliver fresh, targeted , highly interested buyers to their website, most often for a penny or two per visitor . one at a time. With Pay-Per-Click search engines, you don't have to be a search engine guru to get to the top of the list - advertisers bid for the top spot in searches, and you usually don't have to bid much to get there. By adding PPC search engine traffic to your advertising strategy today, you could be pulling hundreds of new visitors to your site every day for only a penny or two each - or nothing at all.

But wait - before you start going out there and placing your site in like a zillion dozen PPCs, let's take a look at what they're all about.

First, the basics:

A PPCSE is a specialized search engine that allows you (the "advertiser" or "member") to choose your own ranking/position in the search results. In this type of search engine, advertisers bid on placement for their listing and pay that amount each time a searcher clicks on their listing. PPCSEs are keyword based search engines, which means that when you add your listing to the engine, you choose keywords that match your site, product or service. You decide how much you want to spend for each keyword, and your bid determines your positions in the search results for that keyword. Usually bids average anywhere from one cent to a nickel per click in most search engines.

PPCs differ from regular search engines in a number of ways. First, as mentioned earlier, the advertiser can decide where their site ranks in the search results, allowing you to control how much traffic comes to your website. Other search engines use different methods to determine which sites are listed up top and which sites are, well ... not seen at all.

There are currently several main types of search engines found on the Internet today. The most popular types are M eta and Contextual search engines and Directories . Meta search engines (AltaVista, Excite, AOLSearch) commonly use a search crawler -- usually known as a "spider" or "bot". This automated "spider" crawls your website, finds links in the website, and then crawls those pages to find more links. As it does so, it usually indexes your page (we can only hope), examines and logs the page text and HTML, stores the keywords and description from your Meta tags, adds them to the search engines "search index", and then moves on. Usually spiders return on a regular basis to continue to log updates to your site. When someone visits one of these sites and makes a search using specific keywords, the search engine uses this "search index" to match your keywords with the information the spider collected from all of its website crawls. In a Meta search engine, the meta tags play a highly important role in determining whether or not your site gets indexed for the appropriate keywords and where your site listings shows up in the search results.

Contextual search engines (Google), also use spiders, but place less of an importance on your site's Meta tags. A contextual search engine matches the text on the page itself to the visitor's search terms based on a number of variables, usually ignoring the meta tags altogether. At the same time, Directories (Yahoo!, DMOZ) list your site based on a rather complicated chain of categories and subcategories. These directories mainly get their content from other directories, and top placement will usually cost you some bucks.

Pay-per-click search engines work in an entirely different way -- there's no need to concern yourself with meta tags, abstract search algorithms, page weight, or even spend tons of cash to get to the top and draw traffic. PPCs operate entirely based on your keywords and description. With a PPC, you only need to choose keywords relevant to your site, create a description that makes visitors want to click on your listing, decide your bid, and then watch thousands of extremely qualified visitors pour into your site.

Now let's talk about the benefits. First of all, unlike most other types of advertising, pay-per-click advertising is virtually risk-free. Since you only pay for visitors actually visiting your website, you don't have to worry about wasting your advertising budget. Basically, nothing happens until someone clicks on your listing. Also, since you choose how much you pay for each click, you set your own advertising budget. Most PPCs offer free search funds to open an account, which means that you can start receiving traffic for nothing. In addition to this, many of the major search engines take their time indexing your site unless you pay an enormous fee up front for "priority listing". With a PPC, your site is listed and drawing targeted traffic usually in that very same day, or instantly.

In the end, Pay-per-click advertising is cheaper, smarter, and more effective than most other forms of advertising on the Internet, including banner ads, "guaranteed" paid traffic, and other forms of traffic generating schemes.

Speaking of cheap, there isn't much out there that 'out-cheaps' a PPC when it comes to quality prospects. For most website owners, Pay-Per-Click search engines offer way more in new website traffic and increased sales than their investment. I think this calls for an example - the numbers speak for themselves.

Let's say you currently own a website that sells a product -- perhaps an anti-wrinkle cream gathered from a distant region in the Himalayas -- and that this product sells for $40 apiece. Now let's just say you open an account with any medium-sized PPC search engine and decide to spend a maximum of $10 in advertising that month. You deposit your $10 and choose a list of keywords for your listing: i.e., "aging", "anti-wrinkle cream", "health and beauty cream", etc. Because there are a few other advertisers with similar products using these same keywords, you only place a bid of $0.03 (three cents) to get to the top of the listings. Later that day, a visitor searches for "aging cream" and gets a list of search results with yours at the top. When they click on your listing, your account is debited three cents, and the visitor goes to your website to check out your product (and anything else you have to offer).

Most websites convert slightly less than 1% of their overall general traffic into sales. However, most website traffic is also fairly untargeted; usually coming from link trades or surfers sort of "stumbling into" their website. When this visitor comes to your website looking for "aging cream", via PPC, they were looking for you and your miracle anti-wrinkle cream - and they'll most likely be that much more interested in buying this product at your website. That means that a visitor that cost you $0.03 just made you $20.00! Even with an average conversion rate of 1% (1 out of every 100 visitors), you would still be paying only $3.00 to make $40.00 -- a profit of $37.00.

Compared to banner advertising - for instance - where you might pay as much as $2 - $3 for every thousand impressions or so just getting people to your site, PPC advertising is consistently the best "bang for your advertising buck". Even the most eye-catching banners average only a click for every 500 page views or so, meaning that you just paid $1.50 for A SINGLE VISITOR. That's paying nearly $150 for ONE sale! This is why many businesses rely on PPC advertising to bring countless fresh, targeted new prospects to their site each and every day.

Okay, so now you can rush out and start adding your site to a zillion dozen PPCs. But where to begin?

Today, there are thousands of PPCs, all over the Internet, covering everything from general searches to smaller niches like hosting companies or even MLM programs. Feasibly, you could advertise on hundreds of them -- most successful web business owners utilize many Pay-Per-Click search engines at once, maximizing and multiplying their traffic. You can find lists of Pay-Per-Clicks all over the internet; in fact, try a search for " pay-per-click search engines " on Google and see what you come up with. However, it's worthwhile to note that not every PPC search engine is worth your time.

When it comes to finding a PPC to list your site, there are several major things to look for. Many -- but not all -- of the larger PPCs may require a lot more money to be listed up top for your chosen keywords; sometimes even as much as several dollars per click . While those of us with less than a million dollars a month in our advertising budgets can still draw a sizeable amount of traffic from slightly lower and less expensive listings, the competition is fierce and the bids change every few seconds. Many website owners use PPC management tools for precisely this reason; to track their listings, placements, and bids in real-time from moment to moment.

In addition, smaller PPCs with little or no traffic can also be a waste of time; why spend tons of time listing your site and adding keywords at a site no one ever sees?

Most website owners focus on the thousands of sites that fall somewhere in the middle. By listing their site with multiple Pay-Per-Click search engines, website owners multiply their traffic several times over.

When choosing a PPC search engine, remember that traffic is the lifeblood for any site -- especially a site that you hope can send you traffic. Look for engines that get a lot of searches (you can usually see this from your advertiser's area), have few external feeds at all (you can generally tell this by looking for listings that don't have the advertiser's bid next to them), you can look into any one of the many PPC review sites on the Internet.

One way to tell a PPC that isn't getting any traffic is to spend a moment signing up and taking a look at the top search terms for the recent period. You can also usually find out if the keywords you use are very popular in searches for the past month; most often this tool can be found in the advertiser's area of the website. Just keep your eyes open. You can often tell pretty quickly which sites are worthwhile and which aren't worth your time.

Another way is to use a service that allows you to sign up with or manage multiple PPCs from one place. This allows you to consolidate your time and efforts from a central location, rather than logging into hundreds of PPCs to check your statistics, change your keywords positions and worry about traffic and popularity.

Once you've signed up for a new PPC account -- or dozens of them - there are a few tricks to maximizing your traffic. You're going to want to keep an eye on your listings and make sure you're still where you want to be in the search results. The "art" of managing keyword bids and ROI is the subject of many, many articles and tutorials, however there are a few key points to recognize when it comes to exploring the PPC world.

1) Remember that "first" position is not always the "best" position. "Bidding wars" are not uncommon in the PPC world and should generally be avoided. Many times, one advertiser might be willing to pay an extremely high bid per listing just to stay on the top of the list, while other advertisers tend to stay within a more reasonable range just under this advertiser, creating a sizeable gap between the first and second spots (or the fourth and fifth spots, or whatever the case may be). In situations like these, a "second place" listing is almost a better deal than being at the top position. While your competition is shelling out $0.50 to stay in top spot for your chosen keyword, you're only paying $0.06 for a comfortable second -- meaning you're still drawing clicks and getting only slightly less traffic than they are. With a decent description, you could possibly even "outdo" the person in the top spot. Also, high bid amounts like this will quickly drain any reasonable advertising budget. Either your competition has way too much money to throw around or will quickly drop out of the race. Either way, it's recommended to let them compete with themselves rather than get yourself drawn into a costly match for first position. This rule also applies to simply staying in the top three, the top 10, or just plain being on the first page. As long as you get targeted traffic at your price, you always win with a PPC search engine.

2) It sometimes can be tempting to choose as many keywords as you can think of that would just get traffic to your site -- regardless of how much they apply to what you're actually selling. Always choose keywords that are relevant to your product or service. Try to avoid choosing "general" keywords -- get specific and use highly targeted keywords to get highly targeted traffic. If you're selling anti-wrinkle cream, you wouldn't want to bid on too many keywords like "cosmetics" or "health". While many prospects searching for these keywords might be interested in your product, this will greatly decrease the quality of traffic coming to your website. In this sense, it's better to choose more targeted keywords than not; choosing too many general keywords will send tons visitors to your site that don't end up purchasing anything, which will lower your ROI. Remember: the more targeted, the better. The less targeted, the more expensive. It's as simple as that.

3) Try to stay away from PPCs that offer visitors incentives for clicking on listings. A lot of these visitors may click your listing just for the incentive, which will decrease the quality of your visitors, therefore decrease your ROI, and waste your money.

4) The best way to get the most out of a Pay-Per-Click search engine is to decide your spending budget beforehand. You need to find out how much each visitor is worth to you. This is discovered by first finding out how much visitors spend on average at your website and how your website tends to convert on the traffic your receive right now . As this changes, you adjust this value and step up the pace.

This is how it works: if you currently receive 200 visitors a day and make only two or three sales a week, then your site is typically converting at 0.2% or so, or 1:450. This means that -- so far -- out of each set of 450 visitors to your site, one of these visitors typically buys something from your site. Next, figure out your average "sale". If you only sell one product, then this would just be the price of that product. If you sell many products, try to come up with an average sale price based on ALL of the products you have available to sell. If you have hundreds, or thousands, of products ... then a rough estimate will probably do. Let's just say for now that your average sale price is $12.50. So far, this means that out of every 450 or so to your site, one person stops in and buys $12.50 worth of products or services. Here's how you break it down:

12.50 (your average sale amount) / 450 (the amount of visitors it currently takes to make one sale) = 0.027 (or $0.03 cents)

So, as of this moment , each visitor is "worth" a little more than two cents each. Essentially, this means that no matter what you do, you should avoid bidding more than this amount per keyword. In fact, you should always bid LESS than this. This way, you'll always make more than you're spending on your PPC listings. If you're just now starting up with PPCs, then this number -- like our example -- is probably going to start off pretty low. Once you've started getting more targeted traffic to your website, this number should increase dramatically, allowing you to get even more traffic and make even more money.

For instance, let's say you've been advertising with a handful of Pay-Per-Click websites for several weeks now and decide to take a look at these numbers again. Because of the increase in quality traffic - meaning more people interested in what you're selling - you're now making one sale out of every 200 visitors or so, or converting at 0.5% (more than twice what you were doing before). That breaks down to:

12.50 / 200 = 0.0625 (or a little over $0.06).

That means that now you can climb higher in the listings, get even MORE traffic, and ALWAYS make money with your listing.

If you currently aren't getting ANY traffic or making ANY sales, start off by bidding as low as possible and tracking your sales over the next few weeks. This will give you a fairly accurate impression of how much each visitor to your site is "worth" when it comes to deciding how much you can spend on each click through to your site.

Since you don't pay for clicks you don't receive, you can also afford to increase or decrease your budget any time you want. By keeping close tabs on what you're spending and how your site's performance, you can quickly generate new sales and increase the amount of interest in your website.

For almost seven years, Pay-Per-Click website advertising has helped many advertisers with a minimal budget stay afloat in a highly competitive Internet market. By making use of the thousands of Pay-Per-Click services out there, you could be tapping the overflow of countless new and highly targeted prospects and making more money with your website than you probably thought you could.

And then, six months later, when your website shows up in the other search engines, you'll actually have the hundreds of dollars it takes to professionally optimize your websites pages and rank higher in those listings as well. While regular search engines offer a great stream of "free" visitors, a decent PPC campaign could dramatically improve the activity ... and the success ... of your website.