PAY PER CLICK SEARCH ENGINES (PPC): This is where you will probably start. Unless you want to wait 1-3 months for your listing to show up in the free SE's you will pay to get your site in front of potential visitors.The king of this hill is Oveture or as you will eventually learn to call it, Overcharge. This used to be the Goto site. They changed the name and did some house cleaning. Bids here will cost far more then a pretty penny. Some gambling related terms will get bids of over $25 PER CLICK. Your best bet here will be to find some related multi word search terms that can still be had for a reasonable bid and settle for less traffic. The traffic there is very targeted and the results are now shown on most of the major search engines as sponsored links. It costs but can pay off nicely.
Find What would arguably be another in the top tier. Pricey, but not as much as Oveture. There are several other Minor Majors and the bids, and traffic drop accordingly. Ah Ha, Go Click, Search Feed and others can provide some traffic at a reasonable cost. Just be careful to make sure the traffic is good. Many SE's have been known to deliver what is affectionately called ‘Crap Traffic”.One area needs to be covered in the PPC section. There are 100's of them. They are popping up like weeds in a garden. Most are totally useless.
PPC sites are sold daily on ebay for less then $100 and there is a free/cheap program out there that makes it easy to run your own PPC. When you are at a PPC you have never heard of put your mouse pointer over a search term. Now look at your status bar in the browser. Do you see /smartsearch.cgi somewhere in the URL? While I am not taking anything away from the program, most people that use it have this idea that they will be the next Oveture and get rich ( from YOUR money I will add ), have NO traffic, have the SE on a $5 a month hosting plan and have NO security to protect you from bogus clicks. If you are bored and want to submit to them, go for it. Most will give you $5-$50 free in your account to try them out. Even with the free cash, most of these are still over priced. Your time is worth more than the traffic you will get from them.