For example, when I went overseas for a month last year, I turned off all my Google advertising while I was away. (That was in days before I had fine-tuned my advertising campaigns. Nowadays, I would just leave ads running, knowing that they would make me money in my absence :-))

You can control where ads appear in world. For example, at time of Australian election last October, one of my clients had an election-related Web site, so we ran some Google ads - but only for Australian Internet users.

You can get even more specific with geography. For example, I can run ads for events that I'm conducting in Sydney, and only show those ads to people in and around Sydney.

You can run two ads side by side and find out which is more responsive. Then you delete weaker ad and replace it with a third ad that you pit against stronger ad. Keep doing this until you find ad that gets best results.

Google tells you exactly which words and phrases people used when searching. For example, when we did advertising for election campaign, we found that "Australian election" had 50% more searches than "federal election"; and "liberal party" had three times as many searches as "labor party"!

--- With all these benefits, why would you ever go for free listings? ---

I hope I've convinced you by now that Google AdWords is best way to get traffic from search engines.

But what about free listings?

Actually, I'm NOT suggesting that you give up idea of getting a free listing in Google. There are definitely advantages to these listings.

What I am saying is that you should go for paid listings first - to test your market, refine your ad copy and improve your marketing. Then put your efforts into free listings if you choose.

Gihan Perera is a co-author of "Get Traffic Fast", a fast-track program to get started with Google advertising, avoiding the common traps and pitfalls.

Sign up to his free mini-course "Google Kick Start" here:

That is power of free articles.

To make your free articles marketing campaign effective, you will first need to carefully identify who your target market is. Once you have done this, you can use your favorite search engine to find relevant web sites. And then out of those web sites you will need to identify which ones allow free article submissions on their web sites.

To be really effective your articles will need to be well written and should address a pressing problem facing your target market of potential prospects.

If you learn how to use articles effectively, you can join as many high-revenue potential affiliate programs as you like without having to spend a dime on advertising.

Still, even if you are determined to invest some money into affiliate program or programs that you have chosen, why not start with free articles first. Your program to speed up things with paid ads will then be much more effective later when you already have your foundation of free articles already generating traffic, leads and revenue.