Titles in the Dummies series range from very, very bad to very, very good. “Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies” is definitely very, very good. Peter Kent also wrote “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies” which is also very, very good and should be read before “Pay Per Click”.

“Pay Per Click” shows off Kent’s talent for leading the reader step-by-step through some moderately complex territory. Kent writes in a clear and concise style, without a condescending attitude and, happily, without corny jokes. He walks through the concept of pay per click advertising, calculating ROI, selecting and bidding on keywords, creating landing pages (a very important concept), finding the right words for your ads (a very tricky) concept and then the pluses and minuses of the various services.

Kent truly does cover the waterfront of pay per click advertising. If you’re looking for a highly readable and information introduction to the subject, this is it.

Jerry

I say that you MAY want to consider PPC, but only after you have optimized your site to attract the attention of the search engines. In fact, I’d say this book is really the second of a two volume set you need to have. The first is the same author’s ‘Search Engine Optimization for Dummies.’ But you also need this one.

For the small cost of this book, you will understand how PPC works with all the major and several of the minor search engines.

Basically, the search engines make money by offering better placement to companies that pay money. On Google it’s the list of companies off to the right and across the top. Do a search for ‘printer.’ You’ll see companies like HP and Epson that want you to click on their site enough that they’ll pay Google a few cents to be sure their names show up.

You may decide that PPC is or isn’t worth using. But in order to make that decision you need to know the rules of the game. Here they are.

Unlike Peter Kent’s other book called “How to Make Money Online with eBay, Yahoo!, and Google” this book is awesome. (The other book I just mentioned is NOT recommended AT ALL.)

In an easy-to-understand language (as all Dummy books are) it tells you how to set up and use Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing to get web traffic. It doesn’t start off in the complete newbie mode like some books (i.e. turn on your computer, establish an Internet connection, go to a search engine…) It doesn’t waste a lot of time trying to bring a complete computer illiterate up to speed (since there are other Dummy books to do that). It gets right to the nitty-gritty.

It talks about a lot of things I didn’t know about PPC marketing and how to maximize the technology to get the most amount of traffic to your website.

Truthfully I’m not a huge fan of the Dummy book series and try to avoid them as much as possible since they tend to cover too much super basic information before getting to any real meat.

However, I’ve noticed that specialized Dummy books like this one versus the general Dummy books (like Computers for Dummies, the Internet for Dummies, etc.) have a lot of useful information very specific to the title of the book. It assumes that the reader doesn’t have to be taken by the hand to first understand what a computer is then what the Internet is before understanding Pay Per Click marketing. It just jumps right in and that’s great. I think I will get more of these specialized Dummy books in the future.

This book is highly recommended if you really want to understand PPC marketing which, if you’ve noticed, there aren’t a lot of books on the subject out there yet.