Becoming a PPC expert is similar to becoming a master chef.   A good friend of mine once rationalized his poor cooking skills this way, “Good cooking is 80% will and 20% talent.”  Without taking anytime to learn how to cook and relying on imagined talent he fails miserably in the kitchen—eating a good meal doesn’t mean you can make one. Similarly, clicking on a text ad doesn’t make you a PPC pro.  But, a successful PPC campaign requires the same ratio of will and talent meaning that anyone who’s willing to dedicate a little time to learn can cook up a great campaign – just like cooking, you shouldn’t just rush into a campaign without being properly prepared.

If you are new to the world of Pay Per Click and search marketing, the best advice I can give is to educate yourself.  If you are a veteran to PPC and SEM, the best advice I can give is to educate yourself.  This industry is constantly changing thanks to updates by our main advertising venues: Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.  In response to such changes, marketers are always discussing new methods and techniques to achieve great results from paid search campaigns in various forums and blogs.

To get started, there are a number of articles I recommend to gain a solid overview of PPC marketing.  First check out PPC 101, this article outlines what PPC is, how to set up a campaign and how to make it successful.  Using Paid Search? is all about fine tuning your campaign and explains how to maximize the impact of your ads.  Like I mentioned before, the biggest advertising venues for PPC campaigns are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.  Here are tutorials to help you get started with these venues: Insider’s Guide to AdWords and YSM Tutorials.

For those who have been using PPC for a while there are several forums and web news sites that will keep you updated with the latest developments.  My favorite forum is Cre8asite, which breaks down Search Marketing discussions into specific topics making it easy to identify the most popular posts.  Webmasterworld is another useful forum; I usually look to see if there are repeat topics between these two sites. Some additional useful web news sites are Read/WriteWeb and Sphinn.  These provide a broader web and tech base, but I recommend reading these too, because it’s important to stay abreast of related fields in addition to just internet or paid search marketing.

A great chef is created through their education and watching other experts.  So as you can see, just like preparing a great meal, you can apply your will to learn how to create and run an effective PPC campaign.  Then, the talent comes from learning the tricks and insights from other pros sharing their knowledge.

(There are plenty more resources available about PPC. Be sure to check out workshops, trade shows, industry mixers etc…)

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