I was asked a very pertinent question recently, "What have you done for me lately? Ooh ooh ooh yeah!"

OK, so I wasn't really asked the question, I overheard the question. OK I heard a song on the radio and finally noticed the lyrics. It really doesn't matter, it got me thinking. What have we done for you lately?

Which, of course got me thinking about how long it had been since I wrote one of these marketing newsletters. Too long. Besides, I just spent an entire day in a seminar on how to market on the Internet and have lots of new ideas I want to tell you about.

What to talk about first? Hmmmm. Of all the things discussed in the seminar the topic which brought out the most questions was Search Engines. Are they useful? Is there a way to get to the top on all of them? Is it worth the money to be on the ones that charge, like Yahoo? Other pay sites?

The answers that came back were Yes, Not cheaply, Yahoo yes, others ??? and consider Overture.com (formerly GoTo.com).

What's Overture.com and why consider it over other search engines? Here's what I discovered:

Overture.com is a PPC (Pay Per Click) search engine with a twist. On Overture.com you "bid" for top placement on their site, and as a bonus top placement on some of the top sites on the web. (Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and more. I'll get back to this later in the article.) When you go to the site (www.overture.com) and put in the "search word(s)" you want your site to come up first on. When the results come up you'll be able to see how much the top people are paying for their links. The example below is for the search term "web design".

By bidding $1.08 (1 cent more) I could now get the top spot on any searches for the phrase "web design" on Overture.com. I would also have to pay $1.08 each time someone clicked on the link and came to my website. This seems like a pretty good deal, $1.08 to get a client. But only if your conversion rate (percentage of visitors buying) is 100%. If only 10% of the visitors to your site make a purchase it now costs $10.80 for a client. Not bad for a service organization which isn't working with a tight profit margin. However if your profit margin is low, you could end up paying more for a client than you're making. And no, you won't make it up in volume! You could make it up in return business from that original sale, but that's another newletter.

So here's where those web statistic reports come in handy. Check your stats and see how many visitors came to your site in a particular time period. Now look at your sales records and see how many sales you made off your site in that same time period. Divide the number of sales by the number of visitors and you've got your conversion rate. Now you've got to figure out whether it's worth the bid price to you to get more visitors to your site.

One tool for this can be found on the Overture.com site. Go to https://signup.overture.com/s/dtc/signup/ now find and click on the "Search Term Suggestion Tool" link. A new window will open. Enter a term you wish to research, and you'll be shown how many searches were done for that term and other terms that include it, for the previous month. I did a test on "Web Design" and found 286,397 searches were done on the term. This was broken down into the ways it was searched for also as follows:

54030 12417 9397 9028

web page design web design company web design firm free web design ...

This will give you some prediction on what amount of traffic could be driven to your site. It will also give you some ideas of what search terms you want to bid on. Look for ones which have a goodly number of searches but very low cost per click. Using "Web Design LA" I came up with 597 searches last month and a cost of only $0.10 for the top listing. So if I bid $0.11, I get top listing. At least till I'm out bid. But as long as I stay in the top 3 spots I show up on all the extra search engines also.

Another plus for Overture.com is they let you write what will appear on the search results. They have you write the title that appears and the description beneath it. Back to the example above:

As mentioned above Overture.com's top three results are shown on many different search engines. They are listed at the top of the results and generally set apart as "Sponsored Websites" or "Products & Services" or in some other way. Some of the sites these results show up on are Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, HotBot, Excite, Netscape, Webcrawler, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Iwon, Infospace and America Online. This is a pretty impressive list. According to Overture.com's website their "search results reach 75% of all internet users".

So now it's decision time, it's up to you, or if you like us, to look at some search terms, see what it will cost, figure out your conversion rate and what your cost per sale will be. Then decide if it's worth it to you. But remember, the people who will see the results are searching for a site like yours. They have put in one of the search terms you chose and read your description of what you do, they are qualified prospects, not just looky-loos.

Missed an issue? Check out the Marketinglist Archives at www.citycent.com/archives.

Want to check out what we've been up to? Check out our most recent designs.

http://www.med-expertise.com

http://www.jhwmspe.com

http://www.tournamentofroses.com/photogallery/index.html