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Click Your Way to Sales: 4 Steps to Maximize Your Traffic Exchange Program
Many webmasters use a common service, called free traffic exchange programs, to increase hits to their sites. Also known as start page exchanges, these websites promise free traffic to you, in exchange for your visiting other...
How Relevant are Banner Ads in Brand Building?
Though a banner space is small it serves multiple purposes for an advertiser — It is the ad message of the company/website, — Allows visual display of the company name, logo and the product — It is the click-through device — it is a concise...
Jagger and the age of business failure. For what?
Jagger and the age of business failure. For what?
The latest Google update, Jagger, has search engine optimisers
all around the world in a state of disorientation. With Jagger,
Google once again attempted to outsmart huge numbers of...
New Medium, New Rules
Life is thought to have begun on Earth somewhere around three billion years ago, and of all the species, only an estimated one in a thousand is still alive today. Academics continue to debate over whether this is a natural part of the...
The power of dogs
Well first of all I was always a cat owner, till my husband bought our first Chihuahua (Stitch) in 2002, Stitch was about 6 weeks old and was generally purchased for our children and it stud that was till he was about 5 months or so. Then I...
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Five Minute Introduction to Overture
If the topic of search engine promotion sounds interesting, but you're not quite sure if you want to deal with submitting to an engine or directory and then waiting for results, there is one search service that eliminates the confusion and ranks sites purely on one factor: how much a business is willing to pay for a listing. This pure-market-based service is called Overture (formerly GoTo.com), and it can generate extremely targeted leads and referrals to businesses willing to pay for them.
Overture operates on a competitive bidding structure. Businesses place per-click bids on specific keyword phrases, such as "automotive parts" or "golf shoes", and the higher the per-click bid a business makes, the higher the ranking that business will receive for that phrase. For example, if Company A places a $0.30 per-click bid on the phrase "motorcycle repair manual", and Company B bids $0.29 per click on the same phrase, Company A's listing will appear before that of Company B. This sounds pretty straightforward, and it is, but there are two factors that are crucial for success with Overture - keyword selection and tracking.
To begin with, a company must analyze how customers search for the products or services they offer, and more specifically, the keyword phrases that are used to find the products or services offered. There is one maxim here that should not be ignored: The more specific the keyword phrase that is bid on, the more targeted the results. For example, the owner of a small used book store may be inclined to bid on terms like "books", "used books", and "book store", but searches on phrases like these would not generate targeted leads. To find good phrases for our book store owner to bid on,
we need to dig a little deeper into her business. Perhaps, because the bookstore is in the Houston medical center area, she has a large selection of used medical books. This would give her a competitive advantage in selling these types of books, so she should try to find phrases that people use to find used medical books online. Phrases like "medical book store", "used medical books", and "discount medical books" would be good phrases to bid on because the people searching on them would be good customers for her business.
The second factor that a bidder at Overture must address is the issue of tracking. If a business doesn't know which search phrases it's leads are coming from, that business can waste a good deal of time and money. This is where Web programming technologies such as PHP, PERL, and ASP can be extremely useful. Without going into too much detail, these technologies can be used to track a customer from click to sale.
If you are interested in Overture, you should read over some of the resources available from their site at http://www.overture.com/. But there is one resource that you won't find unless you are a business that uses Overture, and it is located at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. This second link is to their Search Term Suggestion tool, and it is a useful tool for determining keywords and phrases that are used in searches. It's also a pretty good all-around marketing tool to find out what's hot online.
About the Author
Alan is the lead developer for InfoServe Media, LLC (http://www.infoservemedia.com/), a Web development company that specializes in Web site design, hosting, domain name registration, and promotion for small businesses.
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