If you have considered Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, but don't understand how it works, here is a brief tutorial.

• What is PPC? It is a method of advertising through which advertisers bid against each other to be the top search result on particular keywords or keyword phrases.  For example, if you want to be listed in the top 3 "sponsored" results on AOL for the search term "Hosting", you would need to go to Google AdWords http://adwords.google.com/, open an account and bid high enough for the keyword "Hosting" to be in the top 4 of the bidding.  Please do not click on the links, because you will be wasting the advertising revenue of these companies, but click on the link and look at how the sponsored links appear.
• Why use PPC advertising? As advertising methods work online, PPC can be one of the most cost effective of you know what you're doing, know your product and keep a close eye on your results.  If you are not careful or let your ego get in the way, it can also be very expensive.  PPC is a way to get a small percentage of Internet traffic to visit your website.  Keeping in mind that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-6 trillion websites online, you have significant competition for that traffic.  I can't count the number of times a day customers say to me, "All I want to be is on page one of Google." It would be more realistic in some cases to say. "All I want is to be President of the United States."  Your odds for that happening may actually be better.  What you are doing with pay-per-click is riding on the coattails of those websites that Internet searchers actually DO visit - like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, CNN and many others.
• How do I know what Keywords to bid on?  Some of the PPC companies will offer you keyword suggestions to help you learn how people search.  Again, be careful.  If, for example, you own a Ford dealership in Richmond Virginia, and would like traffic from people looking for a 2004 Mustang, you might get suggestions for the keyword "Mustang".  You DO want to bid on keywords like "Ford dealership Richmond", "Richmond new cars" or perhaps "Mustangs in Richmond, VA".  You probably don't want to bid on simply "Mustangs" since you may end up wasting advertising dollars for people looking for horses or looking for a Ford dealer in California.

Before you begin any PPC advertising, you should consider several things:

• How people look for your product.  You can get this information by asking your customers, looking at your website statistics, paying for a keyword tracking service, using common sense, or looking at they keywords in the meta tags of your competitors.
• Your visits/sales conversion ratio. Since PPC advertising only sends traffic to your website for a certain price per visit, it is important for you to know what percentage of your visitors actually purchase a product.  You can calculate this ratio, by looking at about a year's worth of traffic on your website compared to a years worth of sales.  A good "rule of thumb" is that it takes about 100-200 visits to make a sale.  This means that if you bid 10 cents for a keyword to get visits to your website, you are essentially paying $10-$20 for each sale.
• The percentage of your customers who buy from you a second time. Companies with customers who tend to purchase multiple times (like cosmetic companies) can afford to bid higher than companies who have lower levels of repeat business (like real estate companies), since the value of a new customer is higher.
• Your average profit margin.  You should know the amount of profit you make on a single sale, so you will keep your bidding at a rate that is reasonable.  If you are selling a product with a $5 profit, paying $10 for a sale is only logical if you have a very high level of repeat business from each customer.

Below is a list of PPC programs, all of which we have tested and many of which we use extensively.  We have also tried, GoClick, Kanoodle, Xuppa (formerly Bay9) and many others, which we no longer use or recommend either because their traffic was so low that they were not worth the effort or because their traffic was of such poor quality that we received no sales.  We are not interested in traffic that does not result in some kind of revenue or that is a waste of time.

To sign up for 7Search advertising, Click Here.

Although you will not receive as many visits to your website as on larger PPC search engines, you will enjoy high-quality traffic, very fast sign-up, instant keyword approval and very simple tools for finding and adding new keywords.

To sign up for Google advertising, Click Here.

Example of Google ads on another website: http://guides.bassonhook.com/ 
Another Example of Google on a fishing report site where you can post to the forum with a link to your website: http://www.fishreports.net/fishing/messages/board-topics.html 

Google AdWords^TM now appear on hundreds of thousands of search engines, websites, directories all over the Internet, through Google's partnerships and AdSense^TM program.  If you need to reach customers all over the Internet in the fastest way, this is by far the best program online.  Google also has the toughest rules about bidding on irrelevant terms and about "flowery" ads or ads which exaggerate your company's products.  You may need to hire an advertising specialist to get the most from this type of advertising. Read this first.

Look Button is managed by the same people who use their search engine optimization expertise to operate HitHiker.com, which has enjoyed huge success in major search engines.

• http://www.flydepot.com/ffloop/ - FREE
• http://www.flyfish.com - $15/mo (#3 in Google for "fly fishing")
• http://www.worldwidefishing.com/virginia/fly.htm  - not stated
• http://guides.bassonhook.com/  - good ranking - $40-$50 per year