Hi Stefani
I would highly recommend that you take advantage of the $10 bonus at Kanoodle, which is a pay-per-click search engine (much like Google Adwords, but much less competitive). You dont have to put up a credit card or deposit to use the bonus, which makes it a super-nice way to try your hand at this without any cost:
http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/kanoodle.htm (if you go straight to Kanoodle.com, you wont receive the $10 bonus - this is a special arrangement for SSWT Members & Subscribers).
Before you set up your first Campaign, you'll want to do a bit of research. Choose an Affiliate Program - or one of your own products - to focus on, and then research keywords related to that product or your targeted market - to find out how many daily or monthly searches those terms receive. I use the free trial at and also recently invested in ($65). Make a list of keywords and keyword phrases - as many as you can come up with - and then find out how many competing ads there are for each of those keywords. This is very easy using Keyword Analyzer (it shows you how many Adwords & Overture ads are currently running for any keyword) - or you can wait until you are setting up the Campaign and Adwords or Kanoodle will tell you the potential cost & placement.
Your goal is to choose keywords that receive plenty of searches, but are not very competitive - that you will only have to bid a nickel per click to rank as one of the top three ads on the search engine results pages. With Adwords, I would set my maximum daily cost to $5 (100 clicks) - or with Kanoodle, go ahead and use the $10 bonus (200 free clicks).
You might enjoy the last two issues of Self-Starters Weekly Tips (Feb 3rd & 11th), as I went into detail about my own Campaigns. You can find those online here:
http://www.SelfStartersWeeklyTips.com/articles.htm
Outside of that - if you have any questions - Ask away!