Pay per click (PPC) advertising programs are excellent resources for driving traffic to your website.

Internet marketing is a bit different than traditional marketing, primarily because your marketing efforts have to drive traffic to your website instead of to a physical store.

For that reason, it is essential that advertisements for your internet-based business are visible to an audience that will actually follow an online link that takes them to your website.

Advertising in offline publications is always an option and it can be effective. However, getting your website listed in the search engines is by far the most powerful method for driving traffic to your website.

Getting and maintaining a good rank in the search engines through the process of search engine optimization can be difficult due to heavy competition.

Pay per click advertising is a solution to that problem. With PPC advertising, you bid on the keyword search terms that you want your site to be displayed for.

Advertisements appear in the search engines as sponsored ads when an internet user uses the search term that you bid on.

The ranking of the advertisements is generally determined by the amount of the bid, so the highest bidder gets top ranking in most cases.

On Google, the popularity of the website is also taken into consideration, so the highest bid doesn't necessarily get the top spot.

Pay per click advertising is advantageous to website owners for several reasons.

First, you can get listed in the major search engines quickly and easily.

Second, search engine listings produce excellent results in regard to driving qualified traffic to your website.

Third, you are billed for your advertising on a cost-per-click basis which means that you only pay your bid amount when someone viewing your advertisement actually clicks on the link and is directed to your website.

This is quite different from traditional advertising and some types of online advertising where you pay for impressions.

With PPC advertising, you don't pay for the number of times your ad is seen, or has the potential to be seen, rather, you only pay for responses to the advertisement that actually produce traffic for your website.

The most popular pay per click programs at present are Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

When you advertise with Google AdWords, your advertisements appear in Google's search results and on websites that are in the Google network.

This is really good, because Google is the most widely used search engine so there is a lot of potential for reaching a large audience with your advertisements.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing, your advertisements will appear in several different search engines that the company has agreements with including the two leading search engines that are right under Google in terms of usage - Yahoo! and MSN.

MSN is in the process of development and testing for its own cost-per-click advertising program. Whether or not they will remove themselves from the Yahoo! Search Marketing program is not certain.

In addition to the major search engines, there are smaller search engines, directories and even specialty search engines that target a very specific audience.

Getting listed in these search engines or directories, either through paid listings, free listings, or pay per click listings can be beneficial as well.

There is less competition for listings in smaller search engines, specialty search engines and directories.

Even though they may not be used as much as the major search engines, most do have an audience, sometimes a very precisely defined audience and have potential for producing qualified leads and driving traffic to your website with minimal costs to you.