There are several PPC networks out there, but as principle when you are starting out I suggest you choose one. Don't try to do everything at once, you will be very confused and there is nothing worse than setting up a PPC campaign within a system that you have no idea how to use.

Here are the main PPC networks (for Search Engines):

(1) Google Adwords (Google)
(2) MSN Adcenter (Bing & Yahoo)

There are many smaller ones, but I typically don't recommend too many of those as they are riddled with spam and low quality traffic.

You can also pay for advertising within social networks as well:

(1) Facebook Ads
(2) Twitter Promoted Tweets & Accounts

The first thing that you need to do is visit Google Adwords and create an account.

Google Adwords is where you will most likely want to begin your PPC advertising campaigns. Although at this point you may not have a product or a website chosen, you can still sign up for your Adwords account so that when the time comes to start sending traffic to your websites or landing pages, you can do so without having to sign up for an account first.

When you sign up, you will be asked some questions, including what currency and language you want to use. At this point you will also be asked to create your first campaign, but you don't have a product to promote yet so what do you do? You set up a "Bogus" campaign. You can enter anything that you want with the intention of deleting this first campaign once you have successfully signed up. You will be asked for a display and destination URL, but again, you don't have a website so just enter any website that you can think of.

Try "www.yourdomain.com". You won't be using this campaign, so any URL will do. You will also be asked to enter some keywords. Just enter one keyword, for example, "wealthy affiliate," and set your Maximum Cost per Click at $0.05. When asked to enter your daily budget just enter $1.00. At this point, you will be asked to sign in using your e-mail address. After setting up your sign-in details you'll be ready to sign in for the first time.

Market Share

Again, we recommend signing-up for your Adwords account before you do anything else. Google gets the bulk of all search traffic in the US and the UK. According to ComScore, here are the market share percentages for each search engine as of March, 2012.

Google - 66.4% market share
Bing - 15.3% market share
Yahoo - 13.8% marketshare

Yahoo and Bing combined bring in approximately 29.3% of all searches online, so their search volume is only a third of what Google's market share is, however the traffic within these search engines is also high quality and will convert. If you are looking to expand your campaigns, MSN Adcenter should definitely be considered and their rules tend to be a little more slack than Google.