"Pay Per Click" Search Engines

A new generation of search engines and directories solve at least some of the problems of "free" search engines with a simple economic proposition: Pay to get your link at the top of the list!

Although details vary from site to site, broadly the idea of these services is:

• Open an account and make a deposit (usually $25).
• "Bid" for keywords and phrases that apply to your site - and where you want them to point. Minimum bid is usually $0.01.
• When someone searches for one of your keywords, the results are presented in order of the bids. So, the highest bidder gets their site into the number 1 position.
• If the searcher clicks on your link, your account is charged your bid amount.

Although at first this seems only to be a case of "buying" position, it actually contains benefits for the searcher.

Firstly, the process removes the millions of useless sites that an average free search brings up.

Secondly, a willingness to pay for their traffic demonstrates that the site owner at least believes she has something of value on the site for them.

So, these "Pay Per Click" (PPC) SEs are becoming popular starting points for searches, and they are becoming successful at setting up partnerships to have their results used by consumer and business portals that don't want to run their own search engines.

The Daddy of Them All

GoTo.com is the leading PPC - one of the first established, and boasting the highest number of searches performed. They have several important strategic alliances that mean you can get traffic from some very important sources - like AOL searches.

It's difficult to imagine any PPC strategy that doesn't use GoTo, but there is a flip-side to their success.

• GoTo are very strict about what words you can bid on, and their relevance to the page they link to. This can make it difficult to get them to accept keywords that are important to you.
• They have just introduced new guidelines that mean they won't accept bids for words that are rarely searched for.
• There leadership position can result in a degree of arrogance when enforcing their guidelines - especially when it comes to affiliate site links.

Best of the Rest

In my opinion, the next best PPC site is Kanoodle. They have a substantial number of searches performed, and are more flexible than GoTo on the terms they will accept.

Most factors - such as minimum deposit and bid amounts - are the same as GoTo (surprise, surprise ...). You can open an account here.

Young Pretenders

The success of the PPC model for all parties has led to a number of new sites that are introducing new variables to distinguish them. A couple of the more notable examples are given here:

The first is BrainFox. This uses the Open Directory Project database as the basis of its searches - the ODP being a directory that is put together by a massive team of human volunteer editors - then adds paid links to the top of each search. The BrainFox USP is based mainly on value for money:

• You can start by depositing as little as $5.
• You can bid on traffic starting at $0.001 - that's 1000 visitors per dollar!
• At time of writing, they have an offer that multiplies your initial deposit x 5.

Another new angle is HitsGalore. They are adding a whole range of multimedia ad types to the conventional text listings, and have created a payment/sponsorship model that is designed to dramatically accelerate the uptake and profile of this site.

It's probably only really useful if you're fishing in the (already crowded) internet marketing pond, and it's too early to say how it's working out, but I do suggest you take a look - especially if they are still running the free $20 account deposit when you read this !

Of course, paying for traffic in this way only makes economic sense if you can measure the income and profit from the traffic, but I strongly recommend anyone with a new commercial web site to:

• Open accounts at, and download the bulk submission spreadsheets from, at least a few PPCs.
• Brainstorm a list of key words and phrases that apply to your site - aim for hundreds. Include all possible combos and common misspellings.
• Point them all at your home page with the same generic description and send them off.

Then you can go back to the list and fine tune it - point words and phrases to the perfect page, write better titles and descriptions, then look at your reports and see if you need to increase your bids to get near the top.

Painless PPC

Ok, maybe "painless" is an exaggeration (no pain, no gain they say) - but you'll probably realise that managing the profitability of a large number of keywords on several PPC sites can be a time consuming and costly exercise.

That's why the SBI Manager element of Site Build It! (SBI) is a fantastic tool for anyone building income through a subject focussed web site. It really does take the pain out of identifying, costing, managing and monitoring your PPC keywords, leaving you free to concentrate on the content and other promotions.

It's arguably the most innovative aspect of SBI, but when packaged with everything else that SBI does for site building and promotion, it's a formidable tool to create really efficient, focussed - profitable - web sites, and I stronly recommend every PDCB reader to take a look.