If you are new to Internet advertising, there's one thing that you need to know before you get started. You need to learn about what pay per click advertising is, because it is the most prevalent advertising scheme on the Internet today. Aside from that, you also need to learn about all the different pay per click programs out there. Although I do not work for Google, I believe that you should learn about Google Adwords first. I know you may also have heard about Microsoft Network's advertising program and you have probably heard of Yahoo Search Marketing, but in this article I will explain to you the reason you should learn Google's first. 

Pay per click advertising works like this. If I sell water bottles, and I have a website that showcases them, in order for me to generate qualified traffic, I will have to advertise on Google and bid for the specific keyword "water bottles." Typically when you search using Google, you will notice that on the top and on the right-hand side of the search engine results page, there are sponsored ads in specific positions. The goal for any pay per click advertiser is to obtain advertising positions in the top three spots. Thus in this pay per click business model, what you're doing is you are comopeting for the best spot, paying per click. So if I sell order bottles and I advertise and I decide to rise above the competition, and page $.75 to a dollar per click, I would achieve a suitable and desirable advertising position in search engine results whenever someone searches for the keyword "water bottles." 

This is where we start describing how Google Adwords is superior to any other search marketing tool. The main reason is that Google has more search engine traffic than you can ever think of. Over 60 to 80% of all searches done on the Internet are done on Google. I once did a trial run to see if I could get any traffic or any clicks using Yahoo Search Marketing. I had to pay $30 to sign up, which was quite a bit of money especially since I didn't even know if I was going make anything out of it, and the shocking result was that I didn't. I did not generate any sales and I only received a few clicks. Yahoo is a great place to play games, check e-mail, or read the news. Yahoo Search Marketing, however, is nearly useless. Although there will be many who will tell you that you should throw everything up all on the wall and see what works, I can assure you that you'll be better off spending some more time learning about Google Adwords first. 

Using Google, you can easily sign up for an account, pick your country and territory that you would like to target your ads to, choose your keywords, write up advertisement variations, and just click start. Once you do this, in about five or ten minutes, you'll see your advertisements displayed and bring on the profits. From here on, every time someone searches on Google (and who doesn't search on Google?) you have a high chance of someone clicking through to your site to purchase your water bottles. 

Yahoo Search Marketing is truly one of the biggest competitors against Google Adwords, however, because Yahoo is not such a great search engine platform, most people don't use it to search. And because of this, why bother using any other program other than Google's advertising platform.