By David Gikandi, CEO, SearchPositioning.com
[April 25th, 2001]

See Also   Email Marketing Primer   How to Increase Your Online Sales   Take Advantage of Google's AdWords   Using Foreign Search Engines to Boost Your Sales   Getting Sure Profits Through Google, Goto.com and DirectHit   Ten Places You Must Submit Your Site   Clever Profit Growth Software   The Power Of Personalized Email   How To Go Long With Your Web Marketing   How NOT to Promote Your E-business   Winning the Search Engine Wars   Latest Tips on Search Engine Marketing   Are You Wasting Your Money Online?   Should I Hire Another Salesperson or Invest in an Affiliate Program?   The Death of Positioning?   Links: Why You Need Them and How to Get Them   Your #1 Overlooked Business Asset

[This is the second part of a two part article. The first part can be read here].

Goto.com

Goto.com is another powerful pay-per-listing search engine. The trick is to pay for the top 1 position, or at least the top 1 to 3 positions. Depending on your product, how much gross profit you make out of it, and what your conversion ratio is, you may be able to profit very well with the top spot. Why is the top spot so important? The partners that Goto.com has have a very wide audience. Goto's top search results reach 75 of all Internet users through their affiliate partner network, which includes America Online, Microsoft Internet Explorer, EarthLink, Lycos, and AltaVista! But these partner sites only show Goto.com's top one to three results for any search. Goto uses the bidding model to charge for listing your site. You pay for click throughs, not the number of times your ad is shown. How much you pay for a click-through on your listing depends on what the target keyword is and how much other webmasters have bid to pay for a click. The more you bid, the higher your listing is ranked. You can list your site using multiple titles and descriptions, all targeted for different keywords. So just look for the top spot if your gross margin can allow it. The good thing about Goto.com is that they only charge you for a click through, so you only pay when someone clicks on your link. Top spots can cost you anywhere from 0.01 cents to over $4 depending on the keyword. Your listing shows up in about 3 days.

It is more effective to have about 20 or more keywords/phrases you are targeting, specific and related to your site, than it is to have just one, so come up with 20 or more very specific and targeted keywords/phrases if you really want to win this game hands down. Because Goto charges you for clicks and not displays/impressions, you can list for as many keywords as possible. Their Power Advertiser Change Form allows you to easily compose and submit up to 25,000 adverts - we advise you submit for as many keywords as possible that related to your site because you only pay for clicks on those ads. That form also helps you compose ads in the right format, especially including the appropriate keywords in the title and description of the ads.

You should ensure that for each ad you create for a particluar keyword or phrase, that keyword or phrase appears in both the title and description on that ad. Click through rations can be significantly improved when you have the keyword being searched for included in the title and description of the ad.

Based on your conversion ratio and unit gross margin, you will make a gross profit on all sales generated by your advertising here as long as you bid less than this amount for each click:

Gross Unit Profit * Conversion Ratio

DirectHit/AskJeeves

DirectHit/AskJeeves also has a paid text ads system similar to Google's. Your link appears alongside their search results for every search topic you sponsor. Your link also appears alongside search results on Web sites that participate in the Jeeves Text Sponsorship Network, including MSN, Searchalot, Bomis.com, SuperCyberSearch, and Direct Hit. Your ads appear in a few days and you just need a minimum deposit of $25 to start. You pay for the number of times your ad is shown. They use a bidding system to arrive at this payment amount. How much you pay depends on what the target keyword is and how much other webmasters have bid to pay for their ads to be shown. Bids start at $5 for every 1,000 times the ad is displayed. For most keywords, that is all you will pay.

The trick is to choose very targeted keywords that will trigger your ad. Which means that only very targeted buyers will ever see your ad and your conversion ration will be incredibly high. If your keywords are not well selected, you will end up having your ad showing often but with very few people clicking on it. And because they charge you for ad displays and not click throughs, you will be losing money.

It is more effective to have about 20 or more keywords/phrases you are targeting, specific and related to your site, than it is to have just one, so come up with 20 or more very specific and targeted keywords/phrases if you really want to win this game hands down.

DirectHit allows you to create sponsorships. A sponsorship holds its own keywords and adverts. Each sponsorship has its own statistics that are reported to you. The best strategy to use is to create a separate sponsorship for each keyword and each advert, rather than put all your ads and keywords into one sponsorship. That way, you will easily be able to tell which keywords and ads are doing well and which ones are not so that you can eliminate those that are wasting your money.

You should also ensure that for each ad you create for a particluar keyword or phrase, that keyword or phrase appears in both the title and description on that ad. Click through rations can be significantly improved when you have the keyword being searched for included in the title and description of the ad.

Once you start advertising on DirectHit/AskJeeves, DirectHit/AskJeeves will give you reports showing how your ads are doing including the CPM, which varies depending on the bids. Now, in that AskJeeves report, you will also be told what click throughs you are getting for your ads.

This is how you know when to advertise and when not to advertise with AskJeeves: if the reported click through percentage is equal to or higher than:

(Your Site's Conversion Ratio x Reported AskJeeves CPM) / Your Site's Gross Unit Profit

... then you are making a gross profit on sales generated by that advertising.

Well, there you go. A simple way to make sure that you will make gross profits from having your site on page one of related searches on engines that reach over 75 of the world's Internet users. It is highly recommended that you do list with the pay-for-inclusion engines - it's one of the best, most guaranteed way to get traffic fast and profit from it.

By David Gikandi, CEO at PositionWeaver.com/ AboutWebmasters.com. AboutWebmasters.com is a large interactive webmasters portal featuring everything an e-commerce professional needs. PositionWeaver.com features tools and resources that get you top positions for your web site on AltaVista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light, Google, iWon, AOLSearch, MSN, FAST/AllTheWeb and other search engines.