Mar 07 02 SBC Small Business Newsletter

March 7, 2002

Table of Contents

Staff Article - Intelligent Outsourcing
Tax Tip of the Week - Important Deadlines Approaching!!!

Guest Article 1 - 13 Breakthroughs For Immediate Profits...
Guest Article 2 - INCREASE YOUR SITE TRAFFIC With The Pay-Per-
Click Search Engines And GUARANTEE YOU ALWAYS PROFIT
Using These 3 Simple Formulas
Parting Comments

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Thank you for subscribing to the Peak Small Business Newsletter! We take our obligation to provide you with useful information very seriously. As a result, we always welcome your input on articles or other information you would like to see presented here.

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If you have suggestions for future content, or have issues that you would like to see specifically addressed, please send an email to let us know. Our staff articles are focused directly on issues raised by you, our readers. We want to give you what you want to see!

Quote of the Week

There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men
are forced by circumstances to meet.

- William Halsey

Administrative Stuff

Thanks to everyone who participated in our voting on article
topics in this newsletter. The results were dead even between
marketing, strategy, taxation and rotation so we will continue
to rotate among these topics. Since we are now including three
articles in each issue, we should be able to provide something
for everyone in each issue. Of course, you are always welcome
to suggest topics that interest you and we will do our best to
honor your requests. Just send an email to:

mailto:cary@peakconsultinginc.com

and let us know what you would like to see covered.

The following article on outsourcing is provided as a special
request from one of our subscribers.

Staff Article

Intelligent Outsourcing
by: SBC Staff

Outsourcing was once the domain only of large corporations. Companies like EDS, Accenture and IBM regularly inked multi-billion dollar outsourcing deals with Fortune 500 companies and that became the face of outsourcing for most people.

But today, even the smallest of businesses, home businesses included, can find outsourcing alternatives for operations that could only be done internally in years past.

Consider your email list, or the one you are in the process of building, as an example. You no longer have to maintain your lists in-house and deal with subscriptions, remove requests and bounces on your own. There are many companies that will handle these chores for you, on their servers, for a monthly fee. They will also handle mailings to your list which saves you both time and bandwidth. For those who are just starting to build their lists, there are also free services available.

Industry giants like Oracle are now offering accounting and office application products on an outsourcing basis. So are Microsoft and a host of others. Payroll functions have long been outsourced to companies like ADP.

Companies are offering customer relationship management (CRM) products via the Internet that give each of your salespeople access to the latest sales tools from wherever they might be in the world.

The laundry list of services available on an outsourcing basis could continue for several pages and will continue to grow as time goes on. But the real question is . . . should you be interested in any of them? How can such programs be helpful to you and what are the risks?

The primary draw of outsourcing deals of any type is the ability to preserve your resources for building your business by turning over entire business functions to companies that are ideally suited to handle them. For any business, the largest cost of any operating function is usually employment-related costs. Presumably, outsourcing companies can operate more cost effectively than you can because they specialize in one area almost exclusively and attract and hire the best minds available within their discipline. They develop economies of scale by providing the same business functions for many businesses.

The concept is sound. Many of the companies providing these services are not!

Most of the companies providing these services to small businesses are known as Application Service Providers (ASPs). They are Internet-based organizations and have been cropping up regularly for several years now. Before you consider using one of them, you need to ask yourself several questions and make sure you have solid answers before you proceed.

1. Are they going to be around tomorrow? ASP services are difficult to price and, thus far, pricing variances are wide from one customer to another and many of their business plans have proven suspect. As a result, many of them fail. If you turn over a critical business function to an ASP and it fails, you will sustain severe damage with little likelihood of recovery of damages.

2. Is your information private? If you are transferring critical business data to your ASP, that data is now out of your control. The ASP is responsible for security and data backups. Even the largest and most sophisticated of organizations is not immune to hacking or natural disaster.

3. How do you access your data? Will your connections to your data be fast enough to keep your employees operating efficiently? What happens if your Internet connection goes down?

4. What kind of service level does the ASP guarantee? You need to know your data is available when needed. You should negotiate monetary penalties if agreed-on service levels are not met.

5. Will you save money by using an ASP? You're giving up a lot of control over your business functions. Unless you save a lot of money and work more efficiently by entering into an ASP agreement you should not be considering it.

We would generally recommend you do not outsource your accounting functions to an offsite, ASP-type organization. Accounting functions are too critical to risk. To know the full value of accounting data you only need to lose it and find yourself subjected to an IRS audit. The cost to recreate the data can be enormous. The cost of not being able to recreate it can be even more expensive. Be safe and keep your accounting data under your control. The same is true of any other mission critical data. Additionally, your accounting system should be
integrated with your operational systems, such as inventory, purchasing and sales. It will be difficult to integrate if you move the accounting piece offsite.

Other functions, such as outsourcing your mailing list functions, are more easily outsourced. But be careful. Don't enter into any agreement without understanding exactly what the relationship will be. We are aware of companies that outsourced their mail lists and found out later when they attempted to switch vendors that the outsourcing company had acquired ownership of the mail list under the contract. They stood to lose thousands of subscribers if they switched vendors.

If you are going to outsource any function at all, make sure you understand the contract and negotiate it to meet your needs. If you have questions after reading the agreement, either get someone knowledgeable to help you with it or walk away.

If outsourcing appeals to you from a cost-saving perspective, find a company that will provide the service on your site. As an example, companies like our own Peak Small Business Center will set you up with servers, computers, printers, remote capabilities, internet access for your office, accounting software, office productivity software and anything else your internal IT or accounting functions might require for a fixed monthly fee that includes all maintenance, consumables and even the people to run it all. You save the excess costs of purchasing equipment and hiring additional employees and everything is done on your site. This is small business outsourcing in the more traditional, big-company sense.

But even with a traditional outsourcing agreement you need to pay special attention to your service level agreement. Make sure all responsibilities are spelled out clearly and that you receive rebates on costs if service levels fall below acceptable minimums.

Copyright (c) 2002

Tax Tip of the Week

There are two major tax deadlines for corporations coming up in eight days. March 15, 2002 is the original deadline for filing corporate tax returns, including S Corporation returns, for the calendar year ended December 31, 2001. If you need an extension of time to file, get Form 7004, Application for Automatic Extension of Time to File Corporation Income Tax Return, complete it and mail it to the IRS before March 15. You will receive an automatic six-month extension of time to file until
September 15, 2002. You will NOT increase your chances of audit by extending your return.

If you desire to make an S Corporation election for the calendar year 2002, you need to file form 2553, Election by a Small Business Corporation, on or before March 15, 2002. If you are late and make the election AFTER March 15, 2002, it will be effective for your tax year beginning January 1, 2003. You can complete the form and fax it to the IRS if you prefer. See the instructions to Form 2553 for the fax number to use.

To get copies of Forms 7004 and/or 2553, go the IRS Forms and Publications webpage at:

http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/index.html

Guest Article

"13 Breakthroughs For Immediate Profits..."

By Terry Dean

Too often businesses and individuals only think of profits in a linear fashion. They think of adding 10% more customers this month or this year. They think of growing in small little steps.

You must break out of this mold. The Internet has leveled the playing field. Businesses you have never heard of before have become household names in only a few short years. Think about it. Have you ever heard of Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, or Napster a few years ago? Now, they are front page news on every newspaper every single day.

Fortunes are being made and lost in a single year online. As a matter of fact, there have been more millionaires created in the past 2 years than in the last 200 combined. This new market is still wide open and it is up for grabs to those with the ambition, guts, and speed to take control of it.

The Internet is wide open to you and your business. While the major corporations throw millions of dollars at billboards and TV ads trying to gain the eyeballs of the average population, you can quickly and easily corner a very specialized niche market of your own.

Here are a few ways you can produce immediate breakthroughs at your web sites. Below are thirteen strategies that can and will produce an immediate increase in profits in your web business.

If you are just getting started in your own business, then take the following as an introduction to a profitable web business. Take notes and give yourself ideas you will be able to add into your web site later on in the growth process.

1. Design a High Quality Web Site

The biggest mistake that I see 95% of small business webmasters making is in the area of designing their web site. There are two primary mistakes that I see made over and over again.

The first mistake is to focus so much on the web site design and graphics that they overwhelm the actual product itself. A gorgeous web site is created using Flash, Real Audio, Real Video, etc. but it is never tested to be effective or not. In my own tests, I have found that a simple professional looking site produces the best results...without all the bells and whistles.

The second major mistake that webmasters make is to use the wrong tools to design their site in the first place...and they end up with a very unprofessional looking site. The real idea of the web site design process is to produce something that looks professional, but that doesn't draw away from the text. The key to your web site is have all images and graphics focus your visitors back to your advertising message.

2. Automate Your Email Follow-Up

The key to selling online or selling anywhere for that matter is to follow up with your prospects at least 7 times. You cannot rely on just one visit to your web site to cut the mustard. The biggest profit producing strategy I ever came up with was to start working on getting people to subscribe or opt-in to an email follow-up list by giving them a free training series on my subject.

The easiest tool to use for email follow-up is from Postmaster Online which you can go to from
http://www.postmasteronline.com/home/10683/

They give you 50 autoresponders which automatically follow-up, a complete database system to track all of your prospects and customers, a contact system, and more. It is the best tool I have found to help you increase your Internet response rates immediately.

3. Start an Opt-In Email List

Even with all of my advertising, web site traffic, and promotions, over 50% of my income still comes in through my opt-in email list which I send out almost every week. Starting your own opt-in list is the key to long-term Internet profits. Just like in direct mail, the profit is in the list. Build your list.

The best strategy to handle your email list is to use the Postmaster Online system from above. It can give you a personalized ezine (if you are collecting names with your email addresses) and can handle all of the removes, unsubscribes, and undeliverables for you.

If you can't afford the Postmaster system (even though it is a low monthly cost), then you could get started with the free service from Listbot at http://www.lisbot.com

4. Place a Sponsor or Solo Ad in Ezines

People are always asking me the quickest way to build traffic to their sites. Search Engines usually take a while, banner ads are expensive, and offline advertising takes months. The quickest, lowest cost, and most effective form of online advertising is placing sponsorships and solo ads in ezines and online newsletters.

Nothing else will even come close to the results which you can produce through this method. You can purchase sponsorships and solo ads for $100 to $1000 and often produce results of three to ten times the ad costs if you have an effective ad for the appropriate audience. There isn't anywhere else in the world that you can get this kind of bang for your buck when it comes to spending money on your marketing.

5. Use a Pay-Per-Click Search Engine

Regular search engines take months to get positions in and start bringing the traffic (although you can pay Yahoo's special fee of $199 to get in there quicker). The way to get traffic immediately from the search engines is to start dealing with the pay-per-click search engines such as Goto.com.

Goto.com allows you to set up an account and then you only pay a set fee (almost in an auction model) for each visitor to your site. If you bid one penny per visitor, then you only have to pay a single penny for every visitor to your site. If you bid ten cents, you pay ten cents. If you have tested and can bid a dollar per visitor, then that is what you will pay. How much you pay for traffic is up to you.

There are now several hundred search engines following this model. Most of them don't produce nearly as much traffic as Goto.com, but some of them can be used once you have proven the effectiveness of your keywords at Goto.com first.

You can find thirty of them at:
http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/

6. Participate in Online Schmoozing

Beginning marketers online are always looking for the best free advertising methods, but as the years go by, more and more of these methods are disappearing. The quickest free advertising method available to start participating in online newsgroups, mailing lists, and forums.

You don't directly advertise in any of these groups. You participate in the discussions and allow your small signature file to appear at the bottom of the messages you post. If you post good comments and participate in the discussions, then you will quickly build a good reputation and will generate traffic and sales at your web site.

Newsgroups: http://www.dejanews.com
Forums: http://www.forumone.com
Mailing Lists: http://www.liszt.com

7. Make a Special Offer

If you have built up an opt-in email list (as in number two above), then you can run a special members only sale or special offer. Only current members will get these discount prices or an added bonus that you can create or purchase wholesale.

You could also do a customer's only sale. Send out an email to everyone who has purchased something from you in the past offering them a new special product at a discount price or other bonuses added to current products you sell. Nothing will produce income faster for a business than to contact their previous customers with a special offer.

8. Create a Point-Of-Sale Upsell

This technique can usually increase your web site profits by 10% to 20% immediately the moment you put it in place. It is also very simple to put in place. Once someone orders a product from you, have the thank you page on your web site which comes up show several other products or services that you have available for immediate purchase at a special discounted price.

You will find that often 10% to 25% of your customers will immediately take this opportunity to purchase the other product at the special price (maybe 10% off or something similar).

Stores use this idea all the time. Look at all the small items like magazines, candy, etc. that they pack at the checkout counters. How often do you pick up something else you didn't need just because it was there and you were already in a buying mood?

9. Set Up an Affiliate Program

The king of affiliate programs is Amazon with their group of over 300,000 affiliates. While you don't want or need this large of a number to be successful, think about what it would be like to have 1,000 to 5,000 people eagerly selling your products and services for you with a small share of the profits.

If you don't want to have to deal with any CGI script of any software to run the affiliate program, then you can have it outsourced. Companies such as Clickbank not only take orders for electronic products, but they will also run your affiliate program for you. Many of the other online processing services are now following their example.

You should be able to sign up 300 to 500 new affiliates for a good paying program in less than a month by using the Affiliate Announce program at http://www.affiliate-announce.com/

10. Spread a Virus

If you haven't heard of viral marketing yet, then you must have been hiding in a cave somewhere. For many, it is considered the ultimate online marketing technique. How else would a company such as Hotmail.com grow to over 40 million users while spending next to nothing in ad costs? ICQ quickly spread itself around the Internet without having an ad budget.

Viral marketing basically entails created something for free that others will pass around for you. It could be as simple as a free report or a free ebook, or as complicated as creating a unique software program to be passed around.

11. Send an Online Press Release

The quickest way to generate ten thousand hits or more immediately to your web site at very little cost is to send out an online press release. All it takes is one mention in a newspaper, magazine, radio program, or TV show to drive more traffic to your site in the next 24 hours than you will through all of your other promotions for the next month.

Successful entrepreneurs make it a habit to regularly send out press releases about any new benefits that they offer to their customers. This used to be cost prohibitive through the cost of postal mail and long distance faxing. Now, you can send out the press releases by email or pay only $200 or so to have them sent out for you. Two hundred dollars could never buy you a write-up in a magazine, but a press release could potentially give you dozens.

Personally, I have found Paul Hartunian's system to be the easiest system in the world to follow to get more publicity than you can handle. It is a little pricey, but it is worth every penny: http://www.instantpublicity.com

12. Send Out Articles to Ezines

Here is another zero cost strategy for selling your products or services. Write up a good article with valuable information in it (you could even use our simple article writing strategy) and submit it to the ezines in your niche market. If your article is well done, you will find that much of the time it will be the featured article in many of them.

This is better than having a featured ad in an ezine (and you know how I feel about those)!

13. Start an eBay Auction

This idea won't work for every business, but it could be a significant source of income and traffic for your web site. Over 40,000 powersellers currently sell $2,000 or more per month on eBay (all the way up to $500,000 a month for a few of them). All you have to do is go over to eBay and find out what products are HOT sellers...If yours is one of the hot topics, then you could have a built in money and traffic generator for your site at almost no cost whatsoever...

-------------------------------------

Terry Dean, a 5 year veteran of Internet marketing, will Take
You By The Hand and Show You Exact Results of All the Internet
Marketing Techniques he tests and Uses Every Single Month.
Click here to Find Out More:
http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/nbt.htm

Guest Article 2

INCREASE YOUR SITE TRAFFIC With The Pay-Per-Click Search Engines And GUARANTEE YOU ALWAYS PROFIT Using These 3 Simple Formulas

===================================

How would you like some traffic? How about some cheap targeted traffic? No problem.

The pay-per-click search engines are exactly what you need to INJECT YOUR WEB SITE WITH A FRESH STREAM OF TARGETED POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS -- people who are actively searching for what you're offering -- without the typical expenses and risks associated with many other forms of online advertising.

A QUICK OVERVIEW:

Pay-per-click search engines are much like auctions -- they allow you to bid for top-ranking positions under keywords of your choice.

For each visitor who searches the keyword(s) you rank under and then clicks through to your web site, you pay whatever you bid. Prices typically range from 1 cent to numerous dollars per click-through for popular keywords.

And this means that there are THREE KEY ADVANTAGES to bidding on keywords in the pay-per-click search engines:

1) YOU ONLY EVER PAY FOR ADVERTISING THAT WORKS because you only pay when someone actually clicks through to your web site. This means that pay-per-click search engines can be a cheap way to draw targeted traffic to your web site.

2) Pay-per-click search engines will LIST YOUR SITE WITHIN AS LITTLE AS A COUPLE OF HOURS -- a couple of days at most. So rather than waiting weeks, even months, for your web site to be listed like you will with many of the other search engines, you can start profiting from the increased traffic and sales almost immediately!

3) All you need to do to BE RANKED IN A #1 SPOT is outbid the other sites. It's a pretty straightforward process compared to achieving and maintaining a top ranking position in the "regular" search engines.

Obviously, the pay-per-click search engines are a powerful opportunity to increase your web site traffic for little cost. The trick, though, is making certain that you choose your maximum bids based on the monetary value of one visitor to your web site.

And this is where a lot of people get confused or make costly mistakes... They either abandon bidding in the pay-per-click engines because it seems too confusing, or they bid more than a visitor is actually worth to their site, losing money on their advertising!

STRATEGIES FOR MAXIMUM PAY-PER-CLICK SUCCESS:

In the following article, I'm going to lead you through a simple step-by-step process that will show you how to collect the numbers you need to calculate the value of a visitor to your web site -- using a special three part formula -- and how to use this information to purchase
targeted advertising in the pay-per-click search engines.

STEP #1: COMPILE A LIST OF KEY STATISTICS

Before you'll be able to start calculating the worth of your visitors and what you can afford to pay for advertising, you'll need some key figures; chiefly total number of sales, gross revenue, total expenses, and unique visitors for a set period of time.

a) TOTAL NUMBER OF SALES:

This figure is easy to calculate -- you probably keep a close eye on your sales totals anyway. Just add up the number of sales you have made over a set period of time.

For example, this month you may have sold 73 widgets. So your total number of sales equals 73.

b) GROSS REVENUE:

Here's another figure that you probably already have at your fingertips. After all, what business owner doesn't keep track of their gross revenue?

If you sold 73 widgets for $10 each this month, your gross revenue would be $730.

c) TOTAL EXPENSES:

This is an important figure that many new business owners neglect because, honestly, it's just more fun to calculate gross revenue.

However, until you know your total expenses, you won't be able to accurately calculate your net revenue -- your "in the pocket" profits!

To guarantee that your business always generates a profit, your gross revenue should always be greater than your total expenses.

So sit down and start adding up all of the expenses that you deal with to produce, package, and deliver your product or service. This figure should also include all of your operating costs for a set period of time.

d) UNIQUE VISITORS:

Frequently confused with "hits" (which refers to the number of times each file that makes up a particular web page has been requested from your web host's server), "unique visitors" refers to the number of different people who visited your site. And it's the most important measure of web site traffic hands down!

To calculate the number of unique visitors to your web site, you'll need to contact your web host to get your server logs.

(For those of you who don't know what a "server log" is, it's simply a file that records each time someone requests one of your web pages and the files associated with it -- and IT'S LITERALLY A GOLD MINE OF DATA!)

Your web host should be able to provide you with your server logs. In fact, they may already have log analysis software that will convert your server logs into easy-to-read reports, graphs, and charts.

If not, you can download your own log analysis software by searching "log analyzers" at Download.com (http://www.download.com).

WARNING! If you decide to research and test log analysis software, be careful to look for those that offer "unique visitors" as part of their reports, not just "user sessions." One visitor may return to your site numerous times (user sessions), so to be certain your calculations are accurate, you must know "unique visitors."

STEP #2: CALCULATE THE VALUE OF A VISITOR TO YOUR WEB SITE.

Once, you've collected the statistics and figures you need, doing the actual calculations is the easy part. Simply plug the numbers into the following 3 SIMPLE FORMULAS:

a) CONVERSION RATE: Figure out how many unique visitors you need to close one sale.

Unique Visitors / Total Number of Sales = Conversion Rate

EXAMPLE: If over the month of November, you calculate that your web site received 4,298 unique visitors, and you sold 35 widgets, your equation would look like this:

4,298 Unique Visitors / 35 Sales = 122.8 Unique Visitors Per Sale

So in this case, your conversion rate would equal 122.8, which means that you typically close 1 sale for every 122.8 visitors to your site.

b) NET PROFIT PER SALE: Figure out how much profit you earn on a single sale.

Gross Revenue - Total Expenses / Total Number of Sales = Net Profit Per Sale

EXAMPLE: If over the month of November, you sold 35 widgets for $97 each, your gross revenue would be $3,395 (35 X $97). And let's say you calculated your total expenses (production, packaging, web host fees, etc...) for the month of November to be $2,537.

This means that:

$3,395 Gross Revenue - $2,537 Total Expenses / 35 Sales = $24.51 Net Profit Per Sale

In this example, your Net Profit Per Sale would be $24.51. This is "in your pocket, after expenses, you can bank it" profits.

c) VISITOR WORTH: Figure out how much a single visitor is worth to you.

Net Profit Per Sale / Conversion Rate = Visitor Worth

EXAMPLE: This is the easy part. Just take the Net Profit Per Sale that we calculated in part b ($24.51) and divide it by the Conversion Rate that we calculated in part a.

$24.51 Net Profit Per Sale / 122.8 Conversion Rate = $0.1995 or $0.20

So in this example, each visitor to your web site is worth $0.20. (Not to be confused with the value of a customer, which is $24.51!) This means that you can afford to pay as much as $0.20 to attract one new
visitor to your web site without losing money.

STEP #3: PUT YOURSELF IN FRONT OF YOUR BEST POTENTIAL
CUSTOMERS.

Okay! You're almost ready to put your newfound knowledge to profitable use and start buying targeted traffic in the pay-per-click search engines. I say almost because there is ONE MORE IMPORTANT STEP you may need to take...

Do you know who your target market is? Do you have an accurate profile of the folks who are purchasing from your web site? And do you know what keywords they're searching to find your web site?

If you're not sure, then I'm afraid you'll need to do a bit more homework before you start purchasing traffic because until you know who your customers are and what keywords they're using to find your web site, you risk wasting money on unqualified traffic.

The best way to learn who your customers are and why they bought your product is by speaking with them directly. Get on the phone, do an e-mail survey, offer a free gift for feedback... whatever it takes!

The more you know about the people who have already bought from you, the easier it will be to TARGET NEW CUSTOMERS.

However, another way you can figure out which keywords your target market prefers is by using WordTracker (http://www.marketingtips.com/wordtracker), an online tool that collects the search results from 24 major search engines and compiles them into a database which is constantly being updated.

With WordTracker, you can simply type in your keyword or key phrase, and it will return a list of related keywords and phrases. This is a really useful feature because it will often produce keyword combinations that you may not have thought of!

STEP #4: USE THIS INFORMATION TO PURCHASE TRAFFIC IN THE
PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH ENGINES.

Now that you know the keywords and phrases that your best potential customers are typing into the search engines, and you know the worth of one visitor to your web site, you're ready to start purchasing traffic.

You can start bidding on the targeted keywords and phrases that you've researched based on what one visitor to your web site is worth.

In the earlier example, a single visitor to your site was worth 20 cents. So you could afford to bid as much as 20 cents per visitor in the pay-per-click search engines without losing money.

Now of course, you'd probably want to bid significantly less than that, because you'll want to still turn a profit. But if you were to bid 7 cents per visitor, and it took 122.8 visitors to close a sale, YOUR PROFITS WOULD STILL BE QUITE SUBSTANTIAL:

(20 cents profit per visitor - 7 cents advertising cost per visitor) X 122.8 visitors to close the sale

= $15.96 Total Net Profit Per Sale

Sure, your net profits drop a bit when you pay for advertising, rather than rely on free sources of traffic.

However, you need to remember that YOUR TOTAL SALES VOLUME IS GOING TO GO UP -- perhaps considerably -- as long as you purchase targeted traffic! And that means more cash in your pocket at the end of the day!

PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH ENGINES:

The pay-per-click search engines that you choose to buy traffic from will depend on your budget.

Overture.com (formerly GoTo.com) is still the granddaddy of the pay-per-click search engines, but its popularity has driven up the cost of advertising there.

Minimum bids now start at 5 cents per visitor, there's a set-up fee of $50 (though it's applied to your click-throughs), and there's a monthly minimum of $20.

Of course, with that said, if you can afford Overture, it's still the best choice for driving targeted traffic to your site.

You're likely to GET A HIGHER VOLUME OF TRAFFIC FASTER than with any of the others. Plus, if your site is listed among the top 3 under any particular keyword, you can expect your site listing to appear in AOL, Lycos, and AltaVista searches, too.

Other good choices for purchasing traffic include:

FindWhat -- http://www.findwhat.com
7Search -- http://www.7search.com
Kanoodle -- http://www.kanoodle.com
Bay 9 -- http://www.bay9.com
GoClick -- http://www.goclick.com
ePilot -- http://www.epilot.com
SearchGalore -- http://www.searchgalore.com

From this list, I would recommend purchasing traffic from FindWhat first because this is one of the faster-growing, better-known pay-per-click engines. But all of the above should prove to be...

Good sources of cheap, targeted traffic!

In the less popular pay-per-click engines, you can still purchase listings for as little as one cent per visitor. And remember that while you may not receive high volumes of traffic from any one in particular, because you only ever pay for actual click-throughs to your site, YOU NEVER LOSE MONEY!

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Without a doubt, purchasing traffic from the pay-per-click search engines is one of the most profitable, most effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your web site.

As long as you always base your keyword bids on the value of one visitor to your web site, you can BE CONFIDENT THAT YOUR ADVERTISING WILL ALWAYS BE PROFITABLE.

If you're new to Web statistics, you'll want to base your initial advertising budget on the costs of acquiring a first-time customer. Over time, however, you'll be able to calculate the value of your lifetime customers, and use these figures to consider purchasing higher volumes of advertising.

To ensure you remain profitable, though, and until you're comfortable accurately calculating these statistics, you should focus on purchasing your advertising based on the value of your first-time customers.

Remember: Don't GUESS! Base your advertising budget on tangible statistics -- not your predictions of what your site might earn in the future!

----------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Corey Rudl is the owner of four highly successful online businesses that attract more than 6,000,000 visitors and generate over $5.2 million each year. He is also the author of the #1 best-selling Internet Marketing course online.

To check out his site that's JAM-PACKED WITH THE EXACT INFORMATION YOU NEED to start, build, and grow your very own profitable Internet business, I highly recommend visiting http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/649034

This guy really knows what he's talking about!

Parting Comments

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