The popularity of pay per click advertising has generated plenty of interest from online and offline businesses.

Looking to take advantage of the immense potential that the Internet offers, a wide range of businesses, non profit organizations, government agencies, and religious organizations have started using Google Ad Words and other pay per click search engines.

They have started their own campaigns to educate, collect sales leads, sell products and services, and to disseminate news.

Since pay per click ad campaigns such as Google Ad Words have proven effective, advertisers have increased their PPC spending.

One often overlooked trend in the market place is that while the demand for pay per click advertising expands, so does the cost of each click.

While it was possible in the past to purchase many popular key words for under .25, many of these same key words can now cost up to $10 per click.

This increase in cost has opened the door for many smaller pay per click search engines to bring in customers.

Smaller pay per click engines might only be able to provide a small percentage of the traffic than Google can, but the traffic that they do provide is substantially less expensive.

For instance, www.wholesalequest.com is a search engine geared towards the wholesale business. Its daily traffic consists of a few hundred visitors, which might seem insignificant to a large advertiser.

But if they can attract this traffic to their site for .05 a click, it is up to $1 cheaper per click than the same traffic would have cost them using Google Ad Words.

There are many other small search engines that can provide traffic to your site for a fraction of the cost of using Google Ad Words and Overture.

You should consider www.searchfeed.com, www.miva.com, and www.7search.com

Donny Lowy has set up http://www.billionfreeads.com to provide free online advertising for small businesses.