Being a smart traffic buyer...

Pay per click advertising is just another way of buying traffic. For some reason, however, we often to treat it as a completely unique concept.

That's why you'll see people happily recommending arbitrage strategies where the only goal is to flip traffic from clicking cheap ads into clicking more expensive ones to post Adsense earnings. That's why people spend so much time trying to develop workarounds to Google's policy not to allow Adwords ads to link directly to sales pages.

That's also why some other important parts of what makes traffic so darn valuable get overlooked. Too many PPC gurus are spot-on when it comes to campaign building but are clueless when it comes to knowing how to use and treat that traffic.

Remember, all of those visitors voluntary clicked on your specific ad for your specific product or service. To let them walk away in exchange for a 5-cent ad click just doesn't make a lot of sense.

You should be capturing email addresses with a tempting offfer and/or an opt-in form. You should then be nurturing and building that list for the future.

PPC is fast. It's easy (when done right). It's a short-cutter's dream, to be honest. Maybe that's why those in the PPC field often neglect considering the long-term profit potential of list-building and how Adwords and other similar programs can help.