by Dan Farrell

We all know how important it is to be listed on the major search engines, but if your site isn't listed in the top twenty search

Pay Per Click Search Engines simply allow you to bid a certain amount of money (usually .01 except at Overture.com, owned by Yahoo and is found at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com the biggest, which starts now at .10).

With the pay per click search engines like Overture.com, you "bid" for your position in the search results. For example, let's say the website in the #1 search results position has bid ten cents per visitor, meaning they've agreed to pay ten cents for each person who clicks through to their website. And the #2 position website has bid seven cents, and the #3 position website has bid 5 cents. With this system you can instantly place your website at any position, simply by outbidding the site in that position. Thus, instant positioning. 

Overture.com is by far the most popular, most trafficked one of them all with over 7 million visitors per month. They have editors that have to approve your listings to make sure they are relevant to your site, and usually take 3-5 business days to get your keywords approved. If an editor rejects your proposed listings, reply to their email and explain why you think the term/phrase is relevant to the site you're trying to get listed and that you think visitors from Overture will benefit from your content.  Seems like they have been very picky lately.

However, you can email them back and present your case on why you think it is relevant. Most of the time you can get them to put your listings through.  Overture has partnered with AOL, Alta Vista, MSN, Netscape, Lycos, Hotbot, and Mamma.com. AOL alone has over 42 million visitors per month. So Overture has grown quite considerably the past 6 months.  The big drawback now is that Overture.com has become so popular that many many keyword bid prices are very high. For some keywords, the top results bids are at $1-$2 per click-through. That's only for really competitive keywords.  However the majority of keywords are probably higher. The trick is to find niche keywords and phrases that don't have much competiton.

With the success of Overture.com, a few other pay-for-clicks search engines have surfaced. The notable ones, in approximate order of importance) are...

Overture

Findwhat

RocketLinks

Pocketflier

Simplesearch

Kanoodle

Onesearch

Searchbidder

7search

Thenet1

Hitsgalore

Netflip

SearchUp

ePilot

Searchhound

Sprinks

Brainfox

Brainfox is giving a $25 gift to open an account. Whether you get any traffic from keywords is questionable at this time.

Should you advertise with them? They are certainly less popular than Overture.com, so bids are also much lower. But they do not attract the same volume of traffic like Overture.com, and their

This is probably the most cost-effective advertising on the Net today.  Take advantage of it while it lasts. The key for the "rest of us?"  Work the fringes...and bid on hundreds of keywords. Yes, hundreds because some of the keywords  will return only a few

If you have never made it to the top placements in other search engines, you will certainly do so at Overture.com.

The key to a profitable pay per click search engine campaign is finding the best and hottest keywords with the lowest competition and at least a 100 searches per month. 

The tool I use and highly recommend is Keyword Results Anaylzer. It uses Overture, Google And Wordtracker to locate those keywords and keyword phrases with little to 0 competition. Yes, 0 competiton in some cases! How would you rank with Google if your keyword was the only one? Maybe #1 :o) 

Find out more about KRA by going to:

http://www.ad-alyzer.com/727/kra

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