Pay per click, or PPC, or paid search, or sponsored search, or search engine marketing, or SEM (the beast has many names) is a sure-fire way to go broke if you do it right. To make sure that you give as much money as possible to Google or Yahoo! (or some other deserving, cash-starved company), without actually receiving any economic benefit, follow these seven rules closely:

1. Use a small set of vague, generic keywords. And use broad match on all keywords. You want to get as much general, non-targeted traffic as you can from visitors who are either very early in the buying cycle or have no idea what you sell. Capture as much traffic as you can from people who are just doing research or just browsing. Then hope that they remember your site and come back later.

2. Send all visitors to your home page. Let them find their own way to what it is they are looking for. Just set up one big ad group for all your keywords and let it roll. How else are they going to see your fantastic home page design? Give visitors to your home page lots and lots of options. The more different buttons they have to click, the better. Hey, people love buttons! And make sure that your site is very difficult to navigate. The more pages people have to pass through to find what they are looking for, the better.

3. Write ads just like what every other advertiser is using. The more generic, the better. And never use specific keywords or dynamic keyword insertion in your ads. Why be overly specific?

4. Only run one ad for every ad group (you will only have one ad group if you follow rule number two). It's a pretty safe assumption that, based on your years of experience, you can predict what people will click on.

5. Never do any conversion tracking. Who has time to look at all those numbers? It's easier just to guess what keywords are generating sales. In fact, don't even look to see what keywords people are clicking on. It's more fun that way; kind-of like gambling.

6. Always run your ads all the time and in as many geographic markets as possible. Around the clock - 24/7. Worldwide, baby. This is branding! Only wimps would worry about running their ads in certain markets or at certain times of the day that have proven to be most effective.

7. Always bid for the top spot. Don't be a loser - go for number one! In the words of famed race car driver Ricky Bobby: If you ain't first, you're last.

If you follow these seven rules, you will be guaranteed to achieve the following results:

Lots of generic traffic to your web site.

Lots of confused visitors.

Lots of money spent.

To make sure you blow all your dough as quickly as possible, open accounts with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, and several of the smaller pay per click platforms. The more ads you have running, the more traffic you'll receive, right? So whip out that credit card and let's get started buying some ads! While you're at it, you might want to go buy some Google stock while it's under a thousand a share.