Let's look at advertising from days gone by. No matter the medium for your advertising, TV, radio, newsprint, or web-page, you would be charged a fee. And for your fee you'd get you ads shown for a particular time period and they could be seen by any, and everybody.

Then a some person started thinking that this method wasn't completely fair for internet usage. Not all types of advertising have the same benefit. They also started thinking that because a webpage was particularly busy, and the ads shown on it got more than average exposures to web surfers, why couldn't the page owner also reap the benefits of the higher traffic rates.

Raising the fee for advertising wouldn't really work either, because if extra business didn't continue, that might hurt the sites reputation.

Hence: the birth of the concept of pay per click advertising.

Ads are written by the marketer, using keywords chosen for their productivity, for a product/service they would like to sell. Then the marketer gives these ads to the search engine.

Each time someone searches on the web for a particular keyword the search engine will display the ad. When the ad is clicked on and the searcher goes from the ad to the website linked to the ad, the advertiser pays the search engine a small fee, usually under a dollar, and it is good business for the search engine and the advertiser.

Search engines even carried the process so far as to allow those who were willing to pay a larger amount of money per click for their advertisement (those who "bid" the most on a specific keyword) would have their advertisement placed at the head of the pecking order so that it would be able to receive the greatest visibility and generate more traffic, thereby resulting in both parties turning a greater profit.

Now if asked to name a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising tool most people will mention Google or Google Adwords; but Google is not the only search engine to offer PPC marketing.

Yahoo!, ABC Search, Search Feed, 7 Search, MIVA, Findology, Microsoft AdCenter and Ask.com, are less well known search engines that have ppc advertising services. With these alternatives to Google Adwords, marketers can test their advertising mettle and reap the profits found them.