Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines can be a powerful, instant source of qualified traffic for your website provided you do your homework and invest a bit of time in managing your campaign. In fact, many website owners who've mastered keyword targeting and know the "insider" bidding strategies tell me that more than 90 percent of their traffic comes straight from the PPC search engines!

So I'm going to show you the strategies and tools these folks are using so you can duplicate their success. I'm going to explain hot new targeting options and bid-management tools being offered by the PPC search engines that you can use to increase your traffic while keeping bidding costs low.

A lot of people think the only way to develop a successful pay-per-click campaign is to get the highest ranking with a popular keyword in the top two PPC search engines, Overture and Google AdWords.

Now it's true that a top-ranked ad with either of these two industry giants will guarantee your site a lot of exposure as long as you're bidding on keywords that a substantial number of people are searching for. The problem is, you often have to pay more for these No. 1 spots. And in the case of the more competitive keywords, this can means bids of $1.50 to $5.00 (or more!) per click.

If you want to be successful with the PPC search engines, you need to bid on keywords that attract clicks from "qualified" buyers (as opposed to "tire kickers" who'll drive your costs up) while keeping your bids as low as possible.

Here are seven tips that will help you accomplish that:

1. Figure out what you can afford to bid. This might sound obvious, but it needs to be said: Don't bid more than you can afford! A lot of businesses make this mistake.

Before you pay for advertising of any sort, calculate the value of a single visitor to your site. Once you know what one visitor is worth, you'll know the maximum amount you can afford to pay per click.

2. Being "No. 1" isn't always best. You don't always need to be ranked No. 1 for certain keywords to attract visitors. Sure, it helps if your ad appears in the top 10 results. But people click on listings featured on the second and even third page of results for competitive keywords.

So run some tests. Vary your bids so that your listing appears higher and lower on the page and see what effect the ranking has on your profits. You may actually find that for more costly keywords, a slightly lower ranking is more profitable.

3. Bid on low-cost variations and common misspellings of particular keywords. Frequently, you'll see businesses bidding as much as $5.00 per click for popular keywords while nobody is bidding on common misspellings and similar keywords that cost just pennies per click. Use Wordtracker to locate keywords that relate to your business and are frequently searched by your market, but that none of your competitors are bidding on.

4. Bid on highly targeted phrases with less traffic. Rather than bid on a handful of "general" keywords, which tend to be more expensive because they get the highest number of searches, bid on dozens or even hundreds of highly "targeted" keywords, which tend to be cheap. For example, instead of bidding on "pet supplies," you might bid on "red dog leash," "oversize dog kennel," and "cat toys with bells." You're sure to see better sales conversions on the more targeted keywords because they attract more qualified buyers. And since no one is bidding on these keywords, your advertising costs associated with this traffic are extremely low.

Another benefit of this strategy is that you can direct these qualified visitors to a page that gives them exactly what they're looking for. In the above example, your listing for the keyword, "oversize dog kennel" could link directly to your dog kennel catalog page, rather than to just the home page of your pet supply store.

5. Bid on keywords in the lesser-known PPC search engines. Overture and Google are the PPC industry leaders, but some of the smaller PPC search engines are worth checking out as well. The most popular ones are: