Pay-Per-Click internet advertising is advertising were you bid on certain key words for your advertisement sort of like an auction, if you get the high bid for the keyword or words you’ve chosen your advertisement is displayed. You only pay when users click on your ad.

There are some pay-per-click programs that are pretty cheap such as goclick.com, which I have used however I received no sales through goclick.com. There is also googles adwords and shopzilla which can drain you dry pretty quick.

Although pay-per-click advertising can help drive traffic to you website there are several major problems with this type of advertising scheme.  One of the biggest problems with pay-per-click advertising is click fraud.  Click fraud is were individuals click on advertisements either manually or using software or online bots with the purpose of increasing a competitors payable clicks thereby driving up said competitors advertising costs.

Another problem that exists with pay-per-click advertising, which is especially  true if you operate a website that is selling a product or products like an online store is that click-throughs don’t necessarily mean sales. As a matter of fact in most cases if you are depending on pay-per-click advertising with the intention of selling a product on your website most of the time the person will probably leave without purchasing anything.

There are many different ways to go about starting your own internet retail business; one of the most popular is on eBay. eBay is by far one of the easiest and most widely used mediums for people who want to start there own web based retail business. Depending upon what one wishes to sell eBay can be highly profitable, however given eBay fee structure it can also be quite expensive.

Before selling anything on eBay it is a good idea to research the item or items that you wish to sell, to do this eBay offers Market Place Research. Market Place Research is free for premium and anchor store subscribers and allows you to see how well a particular item has sold in the past 60 days.

Another option to consider when starting up your business is to open your own e-commerce website. If you are an eBay seller then a good choice for an e-commerce website is Prostores, which is a company that is owned by eBay. What makes Prostores an ideal solution especially if you have a high volume of inventory already selling on eBay is the ability to import your products directly from eBay into your Prostore catalog there by saving your self time as well as a major headache by not having to enter information that you already entered for your eBay listings.

Prostores is also much cheaper initially than eBay, starting at $9.95/month.  Prostores also charges a transaction fee for all items you sell however the fees are much, much lower than the fees charged on eBay. For the Prostores starter subscription the fee is 1.5% of all items sold, for business, advanced and enterprise subscriptions the fee is .5% for all items sold. If you do not wish to spend the excessive amount of money that eBay charges for its services than Prostores is definitely worth considering.

I occasionally like to go fishing but this post is not about fishing it’s about phishing. For those of you who don’t know phishing is an online scam were you receive a seemingly authentic e-mail from a company you do business with telling you something like, there has been a security breach on our site and some user data has been compromised. Please log into your account and change your password.

These people are ever so helpful they even provide a link for you to click on that will take you to there site. You click on the link and enter there site, well it looks authentic, but guess again. If you enter your Username and Password they own you. Online con artists are getting more and more sophisticated; all these unethical and unscrupulous individuals need is your email address, user ID, and Password. If you receive an email asking for your user name and password use some caution. Legitimate businesses will probably never ask for such information.

Also look at the URL of the site that you are directed to if it doesn’t look right don’t enter any information. For example I have done a lot of business in the past with PayPal their URL is www.paypal.com. I have in the past received a e-mail claiming that the credit card I use with my PayPal account needs to be updated the URL that I was directed to click on was something like www.tk-3.paypal.com. I knew immediately that someone was phishing for my information. A good rule of thumb to follow is when in doubt don’t click on it.