Jump aboard the digital bandwagon with a pay per click campaign. Learn how to create snappy advert text and make a small budget go further with our search marketing masterclass. By Daniel Jupp.

Every day thousands of retailers and consumers find what they're looking for online: each other. Served by search portals like Google and Yahoo, this virtual network of buyers and sellers has sparked a digital gold rush for internet advertising space. Known as pay per click, Britain's small and medium sized businesses are trailblazing a path across the net, mixing it in with big name brands privy to huge advertising budgets and in some cases, faring much better online than their behemoth counterparts.

Used properly, digital advertising space can be likened to an all-singing, all-dancing virtual billboard, equal to the glitziest displays in London or New York. Unlike the billboard on Times Square, a pay per click marketing campaign can be precisely targeted according to dynamics such as age, gender, martial status, geographical location or time of day.

An ideal solution for businesses operating with modest financial resources, pay per click costs can be strictly controlled. Even dedicating as little as £3 per day to search engine marketing will open up a whole new world of sales opportunities.

Setting up a pay per click campaign is as easy as registering with a search portal. Once registered, you're invited to enter keywords and phrases. The simplest way to make the most of a new campaign is to start with a small number of keywords and dedicate the majority of the budget towards phrases garnering the most clicks.

A concise set of keywords encourages a small budget to hit above its weight. They attract the right kind of clicks and avoid wasting valuable pounds because all of the cash is directed at phrases accurately reflecting the nature of the business. This means the advert only targets clients genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

Although it's tempting to squash as many keywords as possible into the account, restrict yourself to phrases which really reflect the nature of your business. Go through your web site and pick out the most relevant terms. Keywords receiving little or no clicks dilute the overall quality of the campaign and lower click through rates. This results in wasted clicks, poor search positions and a higher cost per click.

After deciding on key terms, the next step is to incorporate those keywords into the advert text. Be as specific as possible. The only way to do justice to a finely tuned keyword list is to write adverts that are similarly well-honed. Badly written advert text is a common cause of a poorly performing pay per click campaign and will once again be punished with a lowly position and low click through rates.

The most common mistake is to omit important keywords from the advert wording. Not only is this potentially a missed sales opportunity, it also means the campaign loses easy brownie points. If you sell used books and used books is one of your keywords for example, use the same phrasing in the advert text. Making your advert relevant to your keywords will raise your quality score, giving you increased visibility and a lower cost per click.

When the pay per click campaign is up and running, the next step is to employ more advanced functions such as time scheduling and advert targeting. Google, Yahoo and MSN all offer advertisers the opportunity to raise and lower budgets and pause and activate campaigns at any time. Use this freedom to test the success of the campaign at different periods of the day. If you're a business to business enterprise, set up time management to show the adverts during business hours only.

Advert targeting is yet another way to make a small budget go further. Use AdWords advanced features such as language targeting or regional and country targeting. If you can only deliver within a certain radius of your business address for example, implement the relevant city targeting so clicks are not wasted on users outside of your business reach.

For MSN advertisers, advanced demographic targeting features could inject your pay per click campaign with a new lease of life. Elect to show your ads to particular age groups or target by gender.

Don't be put off from taking your marketing online just because you don't have vast reserves of cash to throw at a pay per click campaign. Results on a small budget are possible - they might require more creative thinking and pre-planning but a respectable search position and flurry of hot leads are not unrealistic goals if the campaign is well thought out and a disciplined approach to keywords employed.

For more information about pay per click, http://www.topposition.co.uk