Three Steps To Goto.com Success

Following a mention in my free newsletter 'Success Lines'
that I was having some success generating traffic from the
pay-per-click search engine Goto.com, I received an email
from a subscriber asking for a blow by blow account of how I
did it. So, for the benefit of a wider audience here's my
response.

I should first point out that I like to keep things as
simple as possible, so I'll limit this to three
straightforward steps.

Step 1 - Find your keywords

Goto provide a useful tool for identifying the most commonly
searched keywords for the previous month. There's no guess
work here. If a search term has received hundreds of hits in
a month, it's safe to assume that it'll continue to do so in
the future.

First you need to visit the page where Goto provides its
advertising tools. This is:

https://secure.goto.com/s/dtc/center/

Then click on "Search Term Suggestion Tool". This will bring
up a search box in which you type your main keyword. In this
example I'll use the keyword "ebook". The result is a list
of search terms from "free ebook" at 13944 hits to "ebook
publish" at 49 hits.

Step 2 - Find the cost to bid

Having selected your search terms from the list, you need to
determine whether you can afford to bid for them. You're
aiming to get in the top 3 slots, as this means you will be
featured on many other search engines rather than just Goto.

Using the same URL as above click on "Get Current Bid Tool".
This will open a search box in which you type your selected
search term. I'm going to use "free ebook downloads" which
appeared towards the middle of the previous list with around
900 hits.

The results tell me there are only 3 competitors bidding on
this term at $0.06, $0.05, $0.05. So, to get a top 3 place
as cheap as possible I need to bid $0.06 to get 2nd place,
as a $0.05 bid would place me 4th.

Do this for all your search times, listing the ones you can
get cheaply. You'll find some will be very expensive. The
price you bid is what you pay for every click through, so
don't get carried away. The minimum bid is $0.05.

Step 3 - Make your bids

First visit the account set-up page at:

https://signup.goto.com/s/dtc/signup/

Complete a separate section of the form for every search
term you're bidding for. You'll need to list search term,
title of entry, description of entry, page URL, and bid.

Try to include the search term in both the title and
description and you'll get a much better response. There are
full instructions on the page.

You pay a minimum monthly fee of $20, whether you receive
$20 of clickthroughs or not. So make sure you bid on enough
terms. You'll hear back from Goto.com in about 5 days
whether or not each bid has been accepted.

You need to check back from time to time to make sure no one
has outbid you, in which case you need to decide whether to
up the bid. You also receive a monthly traffic report by
email listing the hits on each keyword.

That's basically all there is to it. Remember to be creative
with your search terms. For example, a term containing
"online" may be out of your price bracket, but one
containing "on line" may not.

Be successful!

About the Author

Jeff McCall is the librarian at The Success Library, a vast
collection of ebooks, articles and resources to help you
achieve online success. Get your library card at:
http://www.thesuccesslibrary.co.uk
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