Pay per click (PPC) is a search engine used to promote web sites on the Internet. These search engines allow you to bid for a special position on their result pages, and you pay a certain amount every time someone clicks on your listing. There are three major Pay Per Click search engines - Overture, Espotting/FindWhat and Kanoodle.

Overture has listings appearing on Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, InfoSpace, MSN Search and many other smaller sites. Its "Content Match" program displays listings along with relevant articles, products, etc. It is the largest PPC search engine in the world. Espotting pay per clic search engine is the biggest in Europe and listings appear on the European versions of Yahoo, Lycos, Askjeeves, AllTheWeb and other European search engines. Kanoodle is the smallest of the three, but still larger than other pay per click search engines with 14,000 customers. You can test their search engine for free.

In order to know if PPC is working for you, you have to monitor your bids. It can get quite expensive, as a customer is charged every time someone clicks on his or her listing. If that someone doesn?t become a customer, the fees for the PPC account holder mount up.

Make sure that you know what you are paying "per click," and that you are getting returns on your investment.

Business.com, Enhance Interactive, e-Pilot are other PPC advertising programs that are popular, and shopping search engines hare becoming very popular consumer destinations. A good merchant program can be found at Shopping.com that charges anywhere from 15 cents to 50 cents per click. You create and upload your products. Bizrate allows merchants to bid on top rankings using a variation on the fixed bidding scheme.