I've found that Adwords is a very good way to go for me. I've had a site for many years and have achieved first page results on my most important search terms by years of tweaking. I've found that although I spend over $5000 per month on Adwords, it actually makes sense to do that. I recently looked into doing some ads for another search engine and did analysis on my website traffic. It turned out that in the last period that the software had tracked, 2600 hits were from Google, and exactly 2 were from the other search engine, Leapfish. This confirmed what I had already experimented with; I tried reducing the ad revenue per day then tried increasing it as well. The sales figures for the more expensive days more than made it worth the increase on the stuff I was selling. This is why Google is doing so well. Even though they have you wrapped around their finger, they are the only game in town. In my case, it actually makes sense to pay them absurd amounts of money. I haven't found any other form of advertizing that comes remotely close. In that same tracked period I mentioned, the second search engine on the list, Yahoo, got about 80 hits and MSN about 50, Bing about 30. If you're not on the first page on Google's search for your item, you're not anywhere close to what's possible.