It astounds me how many companies flock to spend advertising dollars on the Net. The amounts grow, month over month. And that leads some to think that the days of free search engine traffic are near-over. In fact, it means the opposite -- the more advertising dollars, the more free content the engines need. Recent events bear that out, in spades. And THAT, my valued partner-in-sales, is fantastic long-term news for SBI!, thanks to its C-T-P-M process (and all the tools necessary to execute it, of course). This message is so important. Millions of small businesses fall prey to the "put up a site (or store) in 15 minutes" lure... and then waste a year and tens of thousands of dollars in advertising, in search of the quick profit. It's the typical false, fast dream. SBI! delivers a solid, from-the-ground-up, ever-growing, momentum-building approach that flat-out WORKS. And it always will. Yup, it does take more effort upfront, but anything REAL and GOOD, anything that builds VALUE, does. And THAT is why the following message is so important. If your audience "gets" this, they'll get SBI!. -- Over the last year, I've talked about the non-sustainability of the pay-per-inclusion SE model. A pay-per-inclusion program, if you remember, is a service in which a SE charges you a certain amount to spider and include y our URL(s) in its database. Regular, repeated spiderings are guaranteed, so you're sure to be listed (i.e., indexed). But rankings, of course, are not guaranteed -- these pages have no advantage over any page spidered for free. Why? There'd be an uproar if they did, not to mention they'd break the law (disguising paid advertising as editorial search results). Introduced a few years ago by SEs like Inktomi, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, and more recently (this spring) adopted by Yahoo!, the pay-per-inclusion model has floundered dismally. And now, it's about to die off altogether. And to whom do we owe our thanks for this? Google. By refusing to adopt a pay-per-inclusion program of its own, Google built THE largest database of sites, allowing it to more accurately address the queries of its visitors. It just makes sense -- if you give away free listings via an easy-to-use, free submission page, you'll have a whole heck of a lot more Web pages than if you charge for listing. About YAHOO! Yahoo! gave in partially some time back, as we predicted, and offered a free submission page, but added the need to login with a username and password. However... I'd go so far as to suggest that a really smart engine removes impediments and focuses on building the best search algorithms to sort out the resultant tremendous quantity, diversity and varying quality of Web pages. Ken Evoy. Google's competitors were unable to deliver results of the same caliber, partly because they simply had less to choose from. Obviously, when you charge for entry into a database, you eliminate 99% of the Web sites on the Net which cannot justify paying such a fee -- and not just great little small business sites -- hobby sites, not-for-profit sites, pure information sites, etc. All excluded. Not good... not if you're a Search Engine. What the advocates for the pay-per-inclusion model didn't understand, and what Google DID, was that their real customer is the advertiser, not the searcher. Nor are Web sites the customers of the engines. To "get" who the customer is, all you have to do is follow the money trail. Advertisers pay engines. Advertisers are, therefore, the customers. So, Google thinks, "We will make the ADVERTISERS happy." Good idea! That means a big database of zillions of Web sites and great technology to deliver highly relevant sites. Yes, of course, great search results are CRITICAL to keep those searchers coming back. That's how you make your money through advertising... advertisers LOVE targeted eyeballs. That means you encourage sites to submit... for free. That means you keep making your search technology better. And you give it away free... to searchers AND "searchees." Then you make your money on the advertising. Hey... does any of this smell at all like television. Give the programming away to the masses? Make the money from the advertisers? Nothing new under the sun, it would seem. So what happened, while Google offered free submission and the others all tried to gouge Web sites for inclusion? Since a SE lives and dies on the quality of its search results, surfers and sites flocked to Google, making it the most prominent SE on the face of the planet. Google clearly recognizes the importance of the quality of relevant editorial search results. Since SBI! is dedicated to the CTPM process... CONTENT -> TRAFFIC -> PRESell -> MONETIZE ... this makes us very happy indeed. And it should more than make YOU happy. Each sale of SBI! earns you annual renewal income... and renew they will. Here's why... http://buildit.sitesell.com/sbi-businesses/traffic-alexa.html -- Google is on record as loving the niche sites. Collectively, niches are more important than any 1,000 top sites. Google needs the millions of niche sites in order to stay on top of the SE mountain! They need SBI!, which "does niche" better than anyone else on the Web. In order to lure surfers back, Google's competitors were forced to begin adding sites to their respective databases for free. It was the only way they could compete with the reigning search king. We predicted it. And... This is a trend that is growing steadily. Let's review... When Yahoo! switched from using Google's crawler results to it's own crawler-based listings in the spring, they also introduced a pay-per-inclusion program of their own. Many people thought this was a big challenge for Google, and a shot-in-the-arm for pay-per-inclusion. We thought it was a shot in the head for Yahoo!. ;-) At that time we advocated NOT to pay to enter Yahoo!'s database. Initially, Yahoo! showed all the signs of not "getting it" -- many sites reported a dramatic drop in listings and traffic, as Yahoo! culled its database of many of its free listings. Despite this, I advocated staying the CTPM course, sure that hard, cold realities were bound to hit Yahoo! on the head sooner or later. It becomes clear to a pay-per-inclusion engine that its database is falling behind. Decreasing quality of search results means surfers go elsewhere. Fewer eyeballs lead to less advertising revenue. And once this happens, there is only one way to rectify the situation -- by improving the quality and relevance of the search results. For the past several weeks, we have indeed been seeing that turnaround. We see deeper spidering by Yahoo!... more and more pages at more and more sites are being indexed. More traffic, too, of course.! Yahoo!'s crawler has been incredibly active of late -- spidering and listing an unprecedented number of SBI! pages. Yahoo! will phase pay-per-inclusion out, mincing words to save face perhaps, but this WILL be phased out before their database falls too far behind Google to catch up. More proof... On a similar note, AskJeeves has announced it will be shutting down its paid program on Sept 30. Paid inclusion programs, once the darling of the SE world, have proven that they simply make no sense for all the obvious reasons. The bottom line is a very, very good one for SBI!... Free search traffic is not going anywhere (except UP), ever. Only large, quality databases can fill the needs of all the searching surfers. Pay-per-inclusion programs kill that. SBI!'s relationship with the SEs is a symbiotic one, each helping the other. By following the CTPM process... CONTENT -> TRAFFIC -> PRESell -> MONETIZE ... SBI! ensures that this wonderful, friendly relationship with the engines will grow and flourish far into the future. It's all so easy... Follow the CTPM process. Create great content. Build your business. Collect the money. It works! When you promote SBI!, you make a terrific, honest recommendation about the very best possible products for most small businesses. Ken Evoy. homebased | free search engine traffic | targeted traffic | web |Last updated: April 5, 2006 5:13 PM