IMAGINE THIS: YOU OPEN AN ACCOUNT IN A MAJOR search engine by charging $10 to your credit card. You then place highly focused ads in the account pointing to the relevant page of your e-commerce site. By the end of the day you have received 2000 visitors to your site at the cost of $1000, ($0.50 per click). And best of all, you haven’t even had to pay for the ads yet..

Further imagine that you have made 20 sales at $500 each, ending the day with $10,000 revenue. You just made a $3000 gross profit. You then pay the search engine $1000 and you are left with a net profit of $2000.

Direct Response Marketing – Redefined
This is today’s reality. Immediate Purchase Intent is the name of the game when it comes to Direct Response Marketing. A traditional marketer on-line and off-line is not accustomed to having immediately measurable ROI like this. And Search engines are a cost effective way to acquire qualified prospects, and convert them in to buyers immediately.

Search is one of the Internet’s most essential and wanted services. As popular as email, search has morphed into an advertising avenue that leverages the web’s inherent ability to link consumers and small- to mid-sized businesses in ways that traditional media alternatives cannot match.

Where else can advertisers “self-serve” themselves to an audience of 200 million-plus consumers, communicate directly with only those prospects who are specifically and currently seeking the goods, services and information that the advertiser provides, and at a cost of $0.15-$0.50 for each customer lead? No other advertising avenue, online or offline is growing as fast as search is currently. In my opinion, search’s impressive growth through the worst ad market in a decade is a testament to its value proposition and potential.

Controlled ROI
The great thing about search-based advertising is that, as an advertiser you can control your keywords and ad creative in real time by adjusting the position of your ads, based on its real-time measurable performance/cost analysis.

By using some simple software like GOTOAST you can do this optimization across the board in all the search engines, portals, directories and intermediate syndication channels such as Overture. These apps automatically check the status and position of your bids as often as you choose and makes appropriate strategic bidding changes based on your parameters. It saves you money by making sure you do not overpay for your preferred position and helps increase sales by ensuring your listings are located where you want them, at the price range you are willing to pay. Whether you have thousands of keywords or just very active, competitive listings, for only dollars a day, it makes your life easier and puts more money on your bottom line.

Instant Gratification
And if the ROI works for you, OR you are smart enough to make this work for you, one can control as much as 1 million keywords through these types of software in real time. This can help you generate large amount of revenue with a tight control on ROI, which you can measure and control every minute. Tens of thousands of business owners already know about one of the best kept secrets on the Internet: paying for small text advertisements on search engines on a “pay-per-click” basis. Probably the best part about pay-per-click advertising is there is no waiting around. Instant Gratification. Qualified visitors to your web site, no matter what your budget is.

Search and Search Engines
Search is becoming the fulcrum on which much of the business on the Internet swings and has become one of the interesting businesses on the Internet, with growing consumer usage, powerful advertiser adoption, advance technological progress, and enormous revenue and profit growth for many search players. Pay-for-performance search advertising has been so successful that it has focused every serious player’s attention on its commercial promise and profitability.

In fact, the Internet boom all started with search during the initial public offerings of Yahoo!, Excite, Infoseek, and Lycos in 1996 and 1997. Since then, search has “reinvented’ itself several times - from search engine, to portal, to traditional media partner, to struggling .com’s, to re-emerging survivors. Ironically, four years of “progress” reached this tipping point: search is now a business, not just a feature.

A Web search is like a three act play: it starts with the consumer who would like to make the search, who then uses the software and other technology in Act Two which makes the search possible, and ends with the protagonist’s arrival at the web page that was searched for. Value is added to this interplay when consumers are able to easily find the information they are looking for. Consumers gain value from arriving at sites that fulfill their needs or suit their interests; destination sites derive value from an inbound flow of visitors who are interested in what they have to offer; and search hosts and intermediaries extract value from making the introduction and the link between the two.

It is estimated that approximately 60 million households, or 90% of the online audience, use Web search services each month. Internet users typically conduct about 6 billion Web searches with over 10 million different search terms employed regularly. The most popular search sites today are Google.com, Yahoo!.com, Microsoft’s MSN, and AOL. The most-used search technologies are offered by Google, Inktomi, FAST, and AltaVista, which are cannibalizing each other at an alarming rate.

Paid Listing Phenomena
Many online advertisers are finding that the performance of Web banners, pop-ups and other forms of Internet advertising including e-mail is declining. Customers are starting to ignore anything on a page that looks like an advertisement. Because of the decreasing effectiveness of these forms of advertising, paid search engine placement has emerged as an effective, important but controversial, alternative because they are not necessarily perceived as ads.

These paid listings allow you to truly buy your way to the top of the major search engines. All you have to do is bid on search terms related to your product or service, and then provide a listing for the search results. The amount of traffic you bring to your site is limited primarily by how much you bid.

Here is a summary of the many unique advantages of paid listings:
• They generate large volumes of site traffic easily.
• They let you avoid the complexities of web pages search engine optimization.
• They give you immediate, measurable results.
• You only pay for listings that get clicked on, so it’s a cost- effective way to do targeted marketing.
Overture, Findwhat, Kanoodle, Espotting and Sprinks, are top-rated companies handling paid listings. You’ll find their listings showing up on most of the major search engines, portals and directories except for Google.Google has a proprietary paid listing program that’s highly rated as well.

How can you capitalize on a paid- listing program?
• Choose the web site pages and offers you want to promote with paid listings
• Calculate your average profit-per-purchase for the items or services on these pages
• Find the keywords and phrases consumers are most likely to use to find your listings
• Write paid-listings results that include your search phrase
• Place listings using a link to your landing pages that can be easily tracked
• Figure ROI by monitoring the cost of your listings against sales
• Re-write your ads and adjust your placement bids on a continuing basis to keep them in the optimal position in the marketplace

And good luck!

Yatin Patel is VP of E-Business, Hotel Distribution Network. Patel has been a core-founding member of HDN’s management team since the company’s start in 1999. As vice president of e-business, he oversees the development and management of many Web sites while also controlling all e-business related issues, including project planning and management, software development, and the creation and execution of Internet marketing strategies. Patel has a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Engineering and Design.