When you talk to people about PPC, everybody assumes that the only networks that matter are Adwords, YSM, and MSN Adcenter. These networks can drive you a whole lot of traffic, and the traffic that you get are more targeted here than some of the 2nd tier networks out there. But there is more to life than just Google Adwords. They are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to a website, and as long as you are in the PPC game, you need to test these methods out to find out which one works the best for you and your business.

Here are some top alternatives to top search advertising networks:

Facebook Ads: a great way to reach out to Facebook community and advertise your business in front of them. You can get a whole lot of Facebook users to come and visit your website, but be ready to walk them through what you have to offer to retain these users and get their business.

StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a great way to get your feed wet with social media advertising and drive a whole lot of cheap traffic to your website. Each impression costs you only 5 cents, but if your visitors favorite your site, you are going to get a whole lot of free traffic from the StumbleUpon community.

ClickRiver: ClickRiver is an advertising network that allows you to get your product/services in front of Amazon customers. Amazon is one of the top web properties on the web, and you can’t afford not to test ClickRiver to see how it works for your business.

LinkedIn:LinkedIn Direct ads are another great way to get your product or website in front of more people. LinkedIn is another top social networking website that is worth testing if you are looking for more traffic.

YouTube Ads: advertising on YouTube is a no brainer these days. You’ve got to be ready to test things out to find out whether YouTube is the right market for you to be involved in. You are not going to be short of traffic, so you may as well try.

There are many other places that you can put your ads on to drive traffic to your website. Your goal should be to test all these different networks to find the ones that give you the best results. There is no such thing as too much traffic. The above networks can drive a whole lot of traffic to your website if you play your cards right. You just have to track and test!

Twitter is one of the hottest web 2.0 services available today. The community may be fairly new but it is growing fast. In fact, it’s growing so fast that the folks behind the service have a hard time handling the expansion. Twitter allows you to reach to folks interested in products in your niche and even find partners. But if you are just getting started with Twitter, you are going to have a hard time getting 100,000 people to follow you. You can always start by providing valuable information to your Twitter followers and reach out to folks who may be interested in what you have to say. You can always give away things to gain more followers. Or you can just promote your Twitter profile and advertise it in front of people who may be interested in your products/services.

Featured Users is an ad network that allows you to promote your profile on top Twitter services such as Friend Or Follow. Folks who use these services are looking to get more done with Twitter. They are looking to do research, find more friends, or manage multiple accounts. Whatever the case, by putting your profile in front of these folks you can get them to check out your profile and become a follower of yours.

Advertising on Featured Users network is not that expensive either. Here is the pricing plan:

• 1,000 impressions = $10 (CPM).
• 10,500 impressions = $100 ($9.5 CPM)

That’s not too cheap, but it’s not that expensive either. Especially knowing that you are putting your profile in front of a targeted community. Featured Users also provides you with appropriate reports to help you decide whether you are making a progress.

Ultimately, you want to make sure you define success before taking advantage of Featured Users. Are you in it to gain a whole lot of random followers or just super targeted followers? How much money are you making per each Twitter follower. What is your conversion rate? How much traffic are you getting, and how does your Twitter traffic affect your overall average visitor value. If you are interested in expanding your Twitter presence, Featured User is certainly worth testing. It’s not that expensive, and you’ll know whether your campaign is working after a couple of thousands impressions.

Your take: how big of a role Featured Users has played in your progress on Twitter?

It’s old news that Google Adwords has gotten a new look. I signed up to try the new look a while ago, and I’ve got to admit it makes it easier to set up campaigns and manage my accounts. You can also set up your local campaigns and target a certain demographics on Google easily with this new interface. I also like the fact that you get to manage your impressions on the content network easily using the interface.

Google has gone out of its way to create a smarter interface to help newbies set up Adwords campaigns fast. After all, if you help people spend money on your network, you are going to make more money in the process as well.

Even the process of research keywords and setting up adgroups has gotten easier. The concept of inheritance has been introduced to the interface to make easy to create similar adgroups fast.

Overall, I like the new interface a lot. I do object to Google setting the default options in a way to extract more money from advertisers but Google is out there to make a profit. What you want to do is make sure you change the default settings in a way that saves you money and gains more exposure for your business. The new interface may take some time getting used to but it’s certainly more exciting than the old interface.

Your take: what do you like/dislike about Adwords’ new interface?

On this blog, I have talked about the importance of consistently testing every aspect of your landing page and offer to make sure you maximize your PPC opportunities. But a lot of people have come to believe that the more bells and whistles you have on a landing page, the more you are going to sell. That can’t be further from the truth. I have seen many ClickBank products that convert very well despite not having too many bells and whistles. Top affiliate offers often connect with prospects on a deeper level, which means even if you don’t have a killer landing page design, you can still make a lot of money promoting these offers.

Take Adword Booster. The landing page is not exactly earth shattering. But it does come with proof of concept and a promise that is too hard to refuse to many prospects. People who read this landing page can put themselves in place of the author and figure out they could be making lots of money from Google Adwords as well.

Another surprisingly powerful landing page belongs to Twitter Traffic Machine. It probably has the worst design I have ever seen for a landing page, yet it converts like crazy. It just goes on to show you that by using video the right away to communicate your product’s values with your prospects effectively you can achieve great results.

By no means do I intend to take anything away from the above products. They are both very successful and have very successful entrepreneurs behind them. And they show you that cute doesn’t necessarily mean the best when it comes to landing page design. Could these guys get more from their offers with a better landing page design? Who knows! That’s why we marketers test things.