Pay per click search engines provide a way for you to basically buy your way to top of search results for any keyword you wish. Pay per click advertising works thru a bidding process, and your ads appear in results pages of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves. With Google Adwords you bid on keywords you want to focus your ad on. For example if someone were searching on "gourmet coffee", if you're highest bidder for "gourmet coffee" you receive top placement for that phrase and depending on search engine, top 3-5 bidders for that phrase also receive placement on first page of unpaid search results.

With Google Adwords "ad campaign" is everything. When you sign up with Google Adwords you have unlimited campaigns at your disposal. I enjoy promoting affiliate programs and in past I spent a lot of time deciding which keywords I would bid on to attract buyers to my affiliate programs. The only tool I use right now is Ad Word Analyzer which saves tremendously on time and gives me an overview of my keyword and/or keyword phrase as it was searched on top two pay per click search engines Google and Overture.

Now that you've done your research and you've collected your keywords and/or keyword phrases, you'll need to open an Adwords account.

When we first got started on internet most of us were addicted to free promotion. We were sure that we were going to get mountains of traffic to our websites simply by placing our ads on FFA pages and signing up for traffic exchange programs. A few weeks later, though, sad reality set in. We were getting traffic but no sales. All that time spent on free promotion and nothing to show for it.

We grew up, internetwise, after that. We realized that making money online was going to involve more work than we first thought. We started looking into promotional programs that cost a few dollars. We started reading up on search engine submission and ezine advertising. We vowed to leave free promotional tools to newbies.

Now, after months or years of being online most of us have totally forgotten about free promotion. We have found techniques that work for us and aren't afraid to spent a little cash on them. The only time free promotion crosses our minds is when we see a new free program on a banner or pop-up.

But is free promotion really so bad that we should forget about it altogether. Are there perhaps a few benefits we can reap from free programs?