Traffic. It is the missing link in most online businesses that fail. To succeed, you need a few consistent sources of traffic that almost guarantee sales day in and day out. Without traffic, an online business simply cannot survive. Whether you sell affiliate products or your own physical products, traffic is critical. One of the most popular ways to drive in traffic is by using Pay Per Click advertising. It is a pay by performance model, meaning you don’t pay unless you receive clicks on your advertisement. Pay per click ads are those ads you see on the right whenever you do a search for a highly searched keyword on a popular search engine like Google or Yahoo. However, many marketers flock over to Google’s Pay Per Click program to try out PPC advertising. With Adwords, competition is increasing every day at a very fast rate, pushing up the cost of keywords. All this hurts your return on investment. If you are smart, you could start off with Overture to see if your campaign turns a profit, then move on to Adwords to branch out and target more customers. When you advertise on Overture, your ads will also appear on high-trafficked sites like Lycos and AltaVista. With Overture, you are likely to pay less for your keywords since there is lesser competition, and get better returns for your investment. Another good thing about Overture is that it’s learning curve is shorter. With Adwords, you need to be very good in your copywriting to get more clicks, because the more clicks you get, the higher your position is. Adwords positions are not only determined by how much you want to pay per click, but also by the effectiveness of your ads. With Overture, how much you pay determines where your ad is placed. Signing off, Fabian Tan
My issue with Yahoo is that they force their very confusing terminology on you and then have, what appears to be, a deliberately confusing interface and range of products. I and many others gave up on Yahoo long ago - their search volumes are low anyway so it's not worth the hassle. MSN has a nice, easy to use interface but the search traffic is laughable in the UK.