Good article for those interested in "Pay-Per-Click" marketing...

> Hello Mike,
> question for you...do you at this point feel
> strongly that this model is stable?

> Is this the way to go for the future?

> Taylor

Taylor,

I think it's about as stable as any other marketing tool available for the net. I've been using Goto and then Overture since February of 1998 and it has provided me with good, consistent traffic. And now with Overture having agreements with other search engines, the potential for additional traffic is large AND more importantly it weakens the folks that are spending all their time on search engine positioning. I mean, if you have #3 rated page on say Google, you would get good traffic. But now Overture comes in above you (and the other folks at #1 & #2) with their (Overture's) top three paid listings per their agreement with Google. It comes down to you have to invest something to get something. Before Overture got to be so large, you spent time manipulating pages to get a good position and now you need to invest some cash. Is that good or bad? Depends upon who you ask. Hackers hate it I'm sure as do the 'get something for nothing folks' but in the off-line world spending coin on marketing is the way things are generally done and it has worked for an awfully long time. I think the 'pay-per-click' model has to be accepted and used by anyone that wants to make some serious scratch on the Internet.

Is it the way to go in the future? It's one of the ways...personally I feel the use of off-line, old-school marketing to drive on-line traffic hasn't come anywhere near its potential. Most are still trying to drive traffic with free stuff like classifieds, ezines, ebooks and search engine postioning. Some of those options are obviously more effective than others but off-line marketing is for most Internet-based ventures the way to go in my opinion.

Take care,

Mike Winicki