Small Investment, Big Payoffs

[skimp: To deal with hastily, carelessly, or with poormaterial. To give inadequate funds to; be stingy with:misers who skimp their own children.]Your web-based business is your baby. This article is allabout not being stingy with your baby!I recently completed a series of articles about searchengines, and it got me thinking.Everyone knows search engine placement is right up therewhen it comes to marketing your web site, product, orservice. What makes it doubly important is that it isgenerally free, which makes this avenue of promotion vitalfor the smaller entrepreneur.I'm not a marketing expert. My articles on web search trendstend to focus on things like whether search engines offerrelevant results, or whether they are easy to use foraverage consumers. But the research for my most recentarticle[http://www.traffick.com/story.asp?StoryID=65 ] - onpay-for-placement search engine Goto.com - convinced me thatthis is a vastly underrated marketing tool thatentrepreneurs need to find out about and begin deploying totheir advantage.Most won't, and that's to your advantage.Of course, you should optimize your site and work onsubmissions to get those "free" listings in the major searchengines and directories first. But if you're like most,after you've done that, you are looking for means ofattracting targeted (eager to buy) and incremental (not thesame folks who are already finding you) traffic to yoursite.The days of "free" search engine positioning are coming to aclose. Looksmart charges $199 for business expresssubmission, and now, there is a new $25 fee for non-businesssubmission. So in the future, it may come down to what ismost cost-effective, not what's free.In weighing various alternatives - banner ads and expensivemarketingcampaigns - larger businesses ask the following question allthe time:what's a new customer worth? Many have determined that acustomer is worth a lot!The quintessential example is AOL. They don't wait aroundfor people to figure out that they are the best InternetService Provider. They send out as many CD's as possible,and blitz us with television advertising telling us that AOLis easy to use. So what if a lot of other services are easyto use? Generally speaking, after the customer is signed upwith AOL, it doesn't matter what the others are doing.You're not AOL, but shouldn't you learn from them? If a newcustomer isworth $20 or $50 to you, or even more, why are you contentto spend zero on getting them to notice you? Even if thereis a slight chance that someone may pay you $1,000 for youraccounting services, or buy a $500 item from you with a $100profit margin, wouldn't the chance to have that customercome straight to your web site be worth a few pennies, maybeeven more than a few?Existing search engine traffic is fine, but it may not beall that targeted.What's more, you don't always have time to optimize yoursite for all theengines, and some search engine tactics may actuallybackfire (get you blacklisted). To save time, you will wantto consider buying some traffic.Some users of pay-for-placement search engines are turnedoff by the experience. This may be because they're deployingthe strategy too tentatively. If you want to get to acertain level, why not just get there this month, instead oftaking baby steps? I know people who are bidding on 3 or 4keywords at Goto.com. I know others - not tycoons, justenergetic folks with a few extra bucks a month to spare -who are bidding on 300-400 keyword combinations. Guess whois really noticing the impact of this strategy?There are many smaller pay-for-placement engines, andoutside of Findwhat.com, they aren't worth the effort forthe trickle of traffic they'll bring you. You should alsoconsider the sponsored links initiative ("Sprinks") atAbout.com, which allows you to bid for link placement on atopical About.com "guide site."At Goto.com, since you only pay for clickthroughs, the riskis minimal provided you can deliver something of interestonce the visitor arrives at your site. While I'm not goingto give you the step-by-step here, there is a way to buildthat listof keywords (and daily targeted clickthroughs) up to animpressive level, while slowly whittling down the averagecost per click to a manageable five or six cents. At thoserates, your banner revenues alone will probably offset themoney you spend on this advertising.If you're bent on faster results, and willing to pay 15-20cents per click, though, by all means up your bids to ensurethat you're in the top three, or even #1 spot for a givenkeyword. The reason your traffic will increase dramaticallyif you do this is because you'll also be showing up inmeta-search engines like Mamma, Ixquick, profusion, c4,Dogpile, and Metacrawler.Because these avenues are going to be a bit different fromthe otherpathways web surfers take to find you through searchengines, for the firstfew 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 youCAN find $50 a month, and on Goto.com, $50 can go a longway. Go ahead, give this a try and see if you don't achieveyour goals more quickly.