Like large companies, small business and home business owners need to advertise. When it comes to advertising dollars, small businesses don't have the budgets of large companies. They must be more careful about how and where dollars are spent.

Because small businesses and home businesses typically don't have the budgets to hire search engine marketers to optimize their websites for first page ranking, the best way to get found on the internet is to use Pay Per Click Advertising.

Pay Per Click Advertising is an online advertising format that enables you to place your advertisements at or near the top of search engines for your keywords based on the amount you bid.

Google Adwords and Yahoo! Overture are the largest and best known PPC search engines. To get your keywords placed on the first pages of these first tier search engines costs two, three, or many times more than getting highly placed on second tier search engines. Of course, the first tier search engines get about 70% of the market. But that means that the other search engines get 30% of the traffic (about a billion searches per month). Most small businesses don't know about or think about this rich resource for inexpensive advertising.

Here is a list of search engines that require a deposit of $25.00 or less and have low (as little as $0.00) per click rates: (I have included the Alexa Ranking (a low number of 1 is wonderful - a high number of 5 million is not good.)

7Search www.7search.com Alexa Rank 4,332

7Search licenses its technology to other search engines. Your site will appear in hundreds of other search engines increasing your reach dramatically.

Brainfox www.brainfox.com Alexa Rank 4,911

The minimum bids and entry fee are low. It opens up the pay per click to companies on a very limited budget.

Findology www.findology.com Alexa Rank 11,634

Findology has a minimum bid of $.03. It provides for fixed or recurring payment methods, traffic reporting, keyword statistics, and has auto or fixed bidding capabilities.

Pageseeker www.pageseeker.com Alexa Rank 100,068

Pageseeker provides extensive information about your keywords, clickthroughs, and your current funds. You can choose to be notified if your keywords are outbid and when your funds reach a certain level.

Search123 www.search123.com Alexa Rank 20,194

Search123 lets you set limits on the amount of money you want to spend in your account by the hour, day, week or by the month.

Search123 also has a proxy-bidding tool that guarantees you will never be knocked out of the top spot.

Searchgalore www.searchgalore.com Alexa Rank 334,003

SearchGalore has an account management area that is easy to navigate and easy to add, remove and edit keywords and URLs. It's reporting feature shows all of the your keywords and categories as well as the costs of your keyword bids.

Win4Win www.win4win.com Alexa Rank 337,255

Advertisers set the price for keyword searches and can set a total limit on the amount spent for searches.

Once you have started to make money using the second tier PPC search engines, part of the profits could be leveraged to invest in the first tier search engines to increase your traffic and profits even further.