Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising Still Profitable?

Until fairly recently, I used to find it real easy to make a healthy profit from pay-per-click advertising. In fact, I never even considered any other form of advertising. It was so easy just to knock-up a simple ad, add funds to my account with a popular pay-per-click search engine, choose a bundle of popular related keywords and then sit back and wait for the sales to come in! It was that easy. To determine how much I could spend on my campaign and to calculate my maximum bid, I would use tracking software to discover the source of my sales and then simply divide the gross amount achieved by the number of visitors to my site. This basic scientific marketing produced a real healthy return on my investment. However, over time my results began to change... unfortunately for the worse! As more and more advertisers took advantage of the fast and easy access to niche markets by ppc advertising, the competition for those popular keywords to gain pole position became more fierce. Everyone wanted to be at the top to gain the most traffic. The result was a bidding war! The battle to reach the top became detrimental to the advertiser. As the bids increased, these popular terms which previously used to attract large chunks of profit became too expensive. Instead of providing a return on my investment, the campaign began to cost more than the amount that was returned in sales. I tried lowering my bids but the amount of traffic that was delivered rendered my campaign ineffective. So this was my position regarding pay-per-click advertising up to a few weeks ago. If you are an online advertiser who has used pay-per-click advertising over the last couple of years or so, then my experience will probably sound very familiar to you.. So when I released my latest ebook, as you can imagine, I was a little wary of committing all my advertising to one popular pay-per-click source. I needed to promote my product but at the same time I didn't need to simply throw money away for the sake of getting a listing in the search engine results. So, I decided to perform a comparison test between 3 different pay-per-click traffic sources with an initial budget of $200 committed to each pay-per-click engine for my latest ebook 'Cash From Your Camera' http://www.kanoodle.com Finally, I tested a new and different kind of traffic source - Have Traffic at Cash From Your Camera which offers a step-by-step guide to those on the threshold of freelance photography and is illustrated with 40+ published photographs. Acclaimed as a great reference source for serious freelancers. For More information please visit http://www.cashfromyourcamera.com