When ever someone mentions the term Search Engine Marketing

(SEM) two words automatically come to mind - Volume and Exposure. These are things that all businesses need to create an ongoing stream of income.

Search Engine Marketing enables your business to reach thousands of potential customers for a lot less than traditional print media and direct mail marketing. Very good news for the smaller business owner whose marketing budget is much less than the bigger corporations.

SEM is a simple concept. You need to build a site and then optimize the content based on keywords that receive good results in search engines. The better your optimization, the higher your placings will be. The internet promotes your business 24-7 but the problem is that you can wait weeks or even months for the search engines cross reference with your site and your keywords. And of course there is no guarantee they will do it at all which can be a problem.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing takes away the risk of a long wait for keyword indexing and instead immediately secures your placing in the top positions. All you need to do is make bids on the keywords you nominate.

The higher the amount that you bid the higher your placings will be. You only have to pay when someone actually clicks through on your link.

PPC allows you to build an opt-in list fast, test ideas for new products and experiment with marketing campaigns. But despite the goodness you do have to pay to stay in the top placings. To do this you can be paying up to $5 or more per click.

Both SEM and PPC, share much in common. They effectively drive targeted traffic to your site. There is a learning curve for optimizing your site for higher places and how to effectively use keywords in PPC campaign. Constant monitoring and tweaking is necessary for ongoing successful results. A time consuming task for the webmaster/business owner.

Contextual marketing is the latest way to market online.

Contextual marketing is just as effective as SEM and PPC but is much simpler to use. It produces volume and exposure, but is way faster and easier to use.

Contextual marketing has huge potential because it takes the best component of PPC and SEM but maintains a simplicity of use.

People reading your ad already pre-qualified themselves as someone interested in what you offer. They found that web page through a search engine. You receive higher quality, targeted visitor to your site. That translates into a higher conversion rate and increase in profits.

If you need an effective way to find new customers then contextual marketing is probably your best option. Try it and compare the results - you might a bit surprised.