Where should you start? Google Adwords, which can be rather costly these days, or Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN? Or would you be better with some of the minor PPC search engines?

Well, my experience is that the minor search engines generally have unresponsive viewers searching for free stuff. This is also the experience of at least two seasoned marketers I know. In other words, you do not get so many clicks, and few are buyers. Certainly, Google is a better place than these to advertise your affiliate products

Google is good but you could pay too much

Among the others, Google Adwords definitely brings results, but so does MSN, although it has a poor website interface which is a pain to use, and which is usually slow. That is worth putting up with, though, because MSN's surfers are responsive, and you will pay less per click than with Google. You will not get so many clicks, though, simply because many more people uses Google than MSN.

I have not found Yahoo Search Marketing (that used to be Overture) less profitable than the other two, but that might depend on the product. It is worth trying all three, and you will find that you can get a $50 free start with Yahoo Search Marketing. But be warned: they will still make you deposit some cash with them, but hey, $50 advertising for free cannot be bad.

I would recommend that you use MSN and Google Adwords to advertise your affiliate products.

Whatever you do, though, make sure you set a daily limit, a limit on each bid, and put in a finish date for the ad. Ending the ad project can be a nuisance because if it is profitable, you have to start it all over again with some PPC search engines.

On the other hand, it stops you getting a huge bill for ads you had forgotten where running. A daily limit of $30 does not seem much, but that is $900 a month, and if you have five or six ads for affiliate products running you can soon spend a lot of money if you forget what is going on.