Search keywords which you have bid for and check for bid gaps between you and your competitors' bids. This should take you less than 30 minutes a week but savings will be substantial.

What if I have a few hundred keywords in my bid list?

You will need a more efficient solution. A number of bid monitoring services have sprung up across Internet. For a monthly fee based on number of keywords monitored, they will monitor your keywords for bid gaps daily and notify you when there are opportunities for savings.

If you use more than one pay-per-click engine, most of these services can monitor bid gaps across multiple engines. Your savings in time and money will be significant, especially if you have placed expensive bids.

Here is a list of online bid monitoring services available:

ClickPatrol http://www.clickpatrol.com Engines monitored: GoTo, Sprinks, FindWhat, Ah-ha, Kanoodle

Keyword Bid Optimizer http://www.paidsearchenginetools.com Engines monitored: GoTo, FindWhat, Ah-ha, Epilot

ManageBid http://www.managebid.com Engines monitored: GoTo, FindWhat, Epilot, Kanoodle, Netflip, Bay9, SearchFeed, 7Search

Position Guardian http://www.positionguardian.com Engines monitored: Goto

You can read more about Google AdWords program or sign up at http://adwords.google.com

Ask.com offers "Jeeves Text Sponsorship Network," where you can have your text ad seen alongside search engine results on participating sites including MSN, Searchalot, Bomis.com, SuperCyberSearch, and Direct Hit. To see how it works, try searching keyword "free" at both AskJeeves.com and one of participating sites, DirectHit.com:

http://www.ask.com/main/askjeeves.asp?ask=free http://www.directhit.com/search.asp?qry=free&alias=websrch

You'll notice, down right-hand column, several text links. These are sponsorship links purchased through Jeeves Text Sponsorship Network. It works much like Google AdWords program except for pricing. At Google, you pay based on popularity of your ad, based on number of click throughs. The advertiser on any one keyword with highest click-through ratio gets highest spot, and therefore pays most. With Jeeves program, you bid on space, much like Goto.com. The difference is you're bidding on CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, not per click. Bidding starts at only half a cent per click or $5CPM.

Another benefit of Jeeves program is that your ad is not as limited in size as AdWords program. You get up to 40 characters for your title and 150 characters for your description. Google limits your ads there to a 25 character headline and two 35 character lines for a description.

You can learn more about Jeeves Text Sponsorship Network or sign up at http://sponsor.directhit.com/

Whether you choose to try AdWords, Jeeves Text, or both, these are powerful new ways to invest your advertising dollars for low-cost, targeted traffic to your website. With rising bids at paid-placement search engines, these may easily become more reasonable ways to drive new traffic to your website.