It was just about an hour before I put this article together that I sat with Konica, our eldest daughter, helping out with her math homework on calculating simple interest. Eyes watery, limbs growing visibly restless, and sleep fast advancing, she struggled with the last problem and at this point something became very obvious to me...she didn't fully master the principles governing the accurate determination of simple interest including time period and rate of interest.

Everything around us is based on a set of principles. Your car is based on a set of mechanical and electrical principles. The bulb in your living room is designed on a set of principles. Your telephone is intricately created on some basic fundamental principles, and did I mention the needle your tailor used to hem your dress or suit? The list goes on and on.

Running a home based business is no different. There are some very critical "know-hows" that you must get the hang of before a work at home dream can come true. Anything from as simple as running an email campaign to as complex as getting the top ten ranking on Google search engine takes into focus some vital insight to avoid becoming the next internet marketing casualty.

One very effective internet marketing tool that can truly make your work at home business take off like a rocket is knowledgeably using pay-per-click search engines. Whilst pay-per-click search engines can be the impetus to your internet success, if used foolishly, they can dry up your bank account! No kidding, pay-per-click campaigns can either leave you whistling all the way to the bank or shamefacedly whimpering away from the bank!

Let's take you back to my preamble which spoke to understanding the principles behind any process. Put another way, nothing in life is to be feared, it's to be understood. Having said that, you can certainly maximize your ROI (return on investment) by building a wildly successful PPC campaign if you understand some basic principles.

Like anything else, you have to first determine a budget. Would you jump in your car/truck, drive to the supermarket, grab the biggest trolley, pack it navel high without first ensuring that you have enough funds to pay for the goods. So, how do you determine your pay-per-click budget? Not that difficult at all.

You must at least know your total sales. This is very easy to calculate as you will see in the following example. Mark sells hand crafted antique glass trinkets made in Poland. He sold 30 pieces this month making his total sales clearly 30. He then calculates his gross revenue, which would work out to be $300 if he sold one piece of ornament at $10 a piece. Mark now needs to determine his total expenses (this is very important). So, let's say he had to spend $2 per glass decoration, let's say a glass chain in this case, then $1.50 shipping, clearly his expenses would be $3.50. Mark would be in a path to profitability because his gross revenue exceeds his total expenses.

But wait...

Mark has to do one more very important thing. He must determine his unique visitors. How does he establish this? Not too hard really. He would simply need to get his server log from his web host, which is a file that details how many unique visitors (first-time visitors to his site, not repeat visitors!) visit his site, in addition to exactly where on the page his visitors landed and even how much time they spent there!

Now that we have got those basics right, it's time to figure out the value of each visitor to your website which would speak to such things as conversation rate (unique visitors divided by total number of sales), net profit (gross revenue minus total expenses divided by total number of sales) and visitor worth (net profit per sale divided by conversion rate).

Next, you need the best keywords for your pay-per-click campaign, but how do we do this? I will save this for my next issue. Keep looking out.

Oh, just before I go, here is another cool Jamaican Tip of the Day:

Did you know that "wicked!" is a Jamaican street slang that means "very good or impressive" Ironical, isn't it?