Goto.com: Small Investment, Big Payoffs

[skimp: To deal with hastily, carelessly, or with poor
material. To give inadequate funds to; be stingy with:
misers who skimp their own children.]

Your web-based business is your baby. This article is all
about not being stingy with your baby!

I recently completed a series of articles about search
engines, and it got me thinking.

Everyone knows search engine placement is right up there
when it comes to marketing your web site, product, or
service. What makes it doubly important is that it is
generally free, which makes this avenue of promotion vital
for the smaller entrepreneur.

I'm not a marketing expert. My articles on web search trends
tend to focus on things like whether search engines offer
relevant results, or whether they are easy to use for
average consumers. But the research for my most recent
article
[http://www.traffick.com/story.asp?StoryID=65 ] - on
pay-for-placement search engine Goto.com - convinced me that
this is a vastly underrated marketing tool that
entrepreneurs need to find out about and begin deploying to
their advantage.

Most won't, and that's to your advantage.

Of course, you should optimize your site and work on
submissions to get those "free" listings in the major search
engines and directories first. But if you're like most,
after you've done that, you are looking for means of
attracting targeted (eager to buy) and incremental (not the
same folks who are already finding you) traffic to your
site.

The days of "free" search engine positioning are coming to a
close. Looksmart charges $199 for business express
submission, and now, there is a new $25 fee for non-business
submission. So in the future, it may come down to what is
most cost-effective, not what's free.

In weighing various alternatives - banner ads and expensive
marketing
campaigns - larger businesses ask the following question all
the time:
what's a new customer worth? Many have determined that a
customer is worth a lot!

The quintessential example is AOL. They don't wait around
for people to figure out that they are the best Internet
Service Provider. They send out as many CD's as possible,
and blitz us with television advertising telling us that AOL
is easy to use. So what if a lot of other services are easy
to use? Generally speaking, after the customer is signed up
with AOL, it doesn't matter what the others are doing.

You're not AOL, but shouldn't you learn from them? If a new
customer is
worth $20 or $50 to you, or even more, why are you content
to spend zero on getting them to notice you? Even if there
is a slight chance that someone may pay you $1,000 for your
accounting services, or buy a $500 item from you with a $100
profit margin, wouldn't the chance to have that customer
come straight to your web site be worth a few pennies, maybe
even more than a few?

Existing search engine traffic is fine, but it may not be
all that targeted.
What's more, you don't always have time to optimize your
site for all the
engines, and some search engine tactics may actually
backfire (get you blacklisted). To save time, you will want
to consider buying some traffic.

Some users of pay-for-placement search engines are turned
off by the experience. This may be because they're deploying
the strategy too tentatively. If you want to get to a
certain level, why not just get there this month, instead of
taking baby steps? I know people who are bidding on 3 or 4
keywords at Goto.com. I know others - not tycoons, just
energetic folks with a few extra bucks a month to spare -
who are bidding on 300-400 keyword combinations. Guess who
is really noticing the impact of this strategy?

There are many smaller pay-for-placement engines, and
outside of Findwhat.com, they aren't worth the effort for
the trickle of traffic they'll bring you. You should also
consider the sponsored links initiative ("Sprinks") at
About.com, which allows you to bid for link placement on a
topical About.com "guide site."

At Goto.com, since you only pay for clickthroughs, the risk
is minimal provided you can deliver something of interest
once the visitor arrives at your site. While I'm not going
to give you the step-by-step here, there is a way to build
that list
of keywords (and daily targeted clickthroughs) up to an
impressive level, while slowly whittling down the average
cost per click to a manageable five or six cents. At those
rates, your banner revenues alone will probably offset the
money you spend on this advertising.

If you're bent on faster results, and willing to pay 15-20
cents per click, though, by all means up your bids to ensure
that you're in the top three, or even #1 spot for a given
keyword. The reason your traffic will increase dramatically
if you do this is because you'll also be showing up in
meta-search engines like Mamma, Ixquick, profusion, c4,
Dogpile, and Metacrawler.

Because these avenues are going to be a bit different from
the other
pathways web surfers take to find you through search
engines, for the first
few months you will be getting a lot of incremental traffic.
That is to say,
new, highly targeted customers.

You may not be AOL, or even a well-funded startup. But you
CAN find $50 a month, and on Goto.com, $50 can go a long
way. Go ahead, give this a try and see if you don't achieve
your goals more quickly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Goodman is Editor of Traffick, The Guide to Portals.
Check out the Traffick Newsletters:
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