Google and Yahoo-Overture control over 90% of PPC market and as such you should seriously consider using them if you want maximum possible exposure to targeted web traffic through PPC advertising.

Sign up for Adwords program is free but they require a $5 USD deposit before they will start to display your ad copy. Google provides an excellent interface to work with. A pleasant modular design groups all of your work into nice "containers" for you to work with.

The system reporting is by no means real time but delay on their results display is palatable when comparing them to other large PPC provider, Yahoo-Overture.

A nice feature that sets Adwords apart from other PPC providers is that your ads display almost instantly after you place them in their system. They have built a lot of their editorial guidelines into ad entry system.

Their system will flag your ad before you can enter it if it doesn't meet their terms of service. That is a lot better than waiting 2-5 business days to find out if your ad had a problem or not. Time is money.

Also provided with your Adwords account are a number of free tools to help you with your campaign management.

While several of these tools are great starting points I have found need to augment what Google provides through my own online research, tools and software as well as e-book purchases.

The lesson learned, everybody that uses Google Adwords has access to same tools that you do, including your competitors. It goes without saying that if you want to get an advantage here you will need other resources to supplement your knowledge other than what Google provides.

Typical Costs associated with Running an Adwords Campaign

There's two ways to approach this:

Are you going to manage your own campaigns?

or

Do you want to leverage someone elses's experience and invest money in a company that can manage your Adwords campaigns?

Let me suggest that you manage your own accounts at least in beginning. Start small and start collecting reference materials while you learn how system works.

Search for other products and resources that can help you but keep in mind some of them won't work out. Don't let that stop your research, there is material out there that can truly help you and save you a lot of money.

Investing in a $40 ebook is a lot cheaper than blowing $500 or more with Google while you are learning ropes.

Having said that if you want to get a successful campaign started now you can enlist an SEO company to manage your Adwords campaigns.

The question is: How will you know who to trust?

You can burn several thousand dollars for overpriced, untargeted traffic if you let wrong companies manage your campaigns. How can anyone honestly know what to look for in an Adwords Management company if you haven't even tried system out for yourself? Food for thought. If you manage your own campaigns at first you will get a feel for system.

Campaign Costs

Ok, let's talk about typical costs you can expect running a Google Adwords campaign for yourself. The good news is Google Adwords gives you potential to reach millions of surfers in a matter of minutes for pretty much as little money as you want to spend.

The bad news is after novelty of having an Adwords account and setting up your first few campaigns wears off it can begin to feel like a job. There are a lot of monotonous tasks that have to be managed and it can be a tough thing mentally to do if you are left cope with Google's tools alone.

Before you spend money on campaigns and resources acquire mental discipline. Realize before you begin that it isn't going to be fun after a while. Google Adwords is a business tool,one of many, and as such it has it's advantages and flaws.

Ok, your minimum initial deposit is $5 to get started as we learned above. Start here, and I suggest resisting urge to JUMP in and start spending like crazy...stay at or near this $5 level of investment for a while.

You're not going to see any returns on this investment financially but you will gain valuable knowledge of how best to use Google Adwords System to generate income without learning hard way.

You have a lot of learning to do before you want to start pouring money into your account. Google is in business of making money and their system makes it "REALLY" easy to spend as much as you want.

Minimum bids start at a reasonable $0.05 USD. After developing your keyword list and dumping it into Google's system you have to start making financial decisions.

If you take Google's suggested bid prices for your keyword list you can pay a lot of money for your web traffic depending on how large your keyword list is and how much traffic these keywords generate.

I can certainly empathize since I have been there. Luckily when I began my marketing career online I was already very familiar with email systems and was able to handle deluge of email that came back my way.

When dust had settled on my first few experiences posting to FFA's I realized a few things.

Blasting to 10 Million or 20 billion sites as Blaster programs I was using claimed to be doing wasn't generating a heck of a lot of sales.

But I started to read some of emails while in course of deleting them all. I came across an advertisement for an Ebook that showed me light and started my journey in "automated marketing".

The book pointed out that posting to FFA pages was a waste of time. Autosubmitters (like one's I was using) were posting to these sites. I never looked at 10 Million sites to fill in my information. I realized that nobody else was looking either. My posting on FFA page was never going to trigger a sale (except from FFA page owner maybe if he is checking out his links).

To make matters worse these sites often roll your link off their pages in a matter of hours giving you no Search Engine value from links. At time of posting MSN was still accepting FFA links as my check at Uptimebot.com showed me (I did a couple of blasts for Cobrasurf to see whether engines would pick them up, how long they would last and speed at which engines indexed them).

I don't want to get off topic into SEO but I do want to point out some search engines view FFA sites as "bad neighborhoods". It's your call whether you want to post there or not. I like to get ads from FFA owners to see what programs are out there and what's new. FFA blasts are a great way to keep abreast of what's "going on".

So what is value of an FFA page to me other than to get ads Mike?

I have to thank ebook for answer to this one as well. The best value you can get from an FFA page is not posting a link on it but owning it. Owning an FFA page allows you to send a one time advertisement to everyone that posts there. There are several services out there of quality that can provide you literally thousands of these types of leads a day. If you pay more in most cases you are getting better quality or more exclusivity with leads.

They will collect them, double opt them in (ie confirm their identity and email address deliverability), and in most cases email your message to them automatically at a time interval you select (ie 0-7 days delay).