Thinking Outside the Box

Some of the most profitable marketing comes from thinking outside the box. For a long time, I have not considered any Cost-Per-Click (CPC) advertising other than Google Adwords. However, in the Fall 2008 issue of Search Marketing Standard, they suggest that there can be advantages of using CPC services of the other popular search engines.

Speaking of MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask, they say,

"A substantial number of people out there are fiercely loyal to one of the engines and never use Google, so avoiding these traffic sources means you are missing some potential clients."

The artist in me says to only rely on traffic from natural searches via the search engines. This is because I know that valuable, original content is what the search engines reward with high rankings.

The pragmatist in me says I should also use CPC to increase targeted traffic. By targeted traffic, I am thinking that someone if more likely to click on a sponsored ad if they are shopping.