[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: http://www.traffick.com/newsletters.asp. They're triple-filtered for smoothness and enjoyed by thousands of business and Internet professionals worldwide.