Pay-Per-Click Search Engines

Hi Mike,

I've advertised on pay per click sites - you can either lose money or make money with them (like with anything else!). It all depends on - how much you have to pay per click, how many of those clicks convert to sales, and how much profit you make per sale. The only way to find out if you'll make money with it is to try it!

One thing you want a pay-per-click search engine to have, though, is traffic! It looks like www.ucansearch4it.com has almost no traffic, and is therefore a poor place to advertise.

I think there are only really two search engines worth paying-per-click. These are Overture www.overture.com (formerly known as Goto.com) and Google Adwords http://www.google.com/ads/ . (I've used both.) I suggest trying one or both of these out!

As I said, you could make money or lose money. The key is to try it out, TRACK your results - so you can tell if with any particular ad, you're making more money than you spend, or losing money. Then, ditch the money-losing ads, and keep the money-making ones. :)

- Dien Rice

The PPC search engine you mentioned uses smartsearch.cgi to run the database. While it is a great little script, and ideal for running niche PPC sites, it has been rather abused by Ebayers selling "turnkey PPC sites" using it, promising thousands of dollars profit. However, these generic sites have no traffic, and little prospect of getting any. There is various trickery going on in the background to populate the database and make them appear to have lots of paying customers.
Overture and Google are great producers once you have tweaked your system for profitability, but I do not advise them to start out on. They will scoop up cash really fast!
Findwhat used to work well for me, (havent used it in a while) at around 10-40% of the cost of overture. For a lot of info check out Nathan Powers site: payperclicksearchengines.com (I think thats right).




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