Indexing Help Needed

The SE's are taking my profits!

[pjzak]

Hi Gang,
I'm new here, so here's my first post.
I'm just 6 month's into this Internet world after 28 years in the defense industry (downsizing, what else!)
I started with a couple of sites I bought on Ebay (don't laugh, we all start somewhere). Now I own a nice site selling supplements. I'm doing about $40,000.00 a month in sales. Except a lot of my profits go to the SE's. I've been submitting my site to all the freebies and doing the PPC's, as well as the pay for inclusions. I play with the bids, and I'm trying to find the right ROI. I use some submission software every 2 weeks or so. My site has been "up" for about 2 month's. I could ramble on and on here...
My question:
When can I back off on these pay per click engines taking my profits?
Is there a right mixture? Can I bid much lower, and still get my clicks? When will the spiders do ALL or most of the work for me?
I am listed with: Overture, Google, ah-ha, Ask Jeeves, allestra, Kanoodle, Looksmart, Findwhat, DMOZ...
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks

[edited by: eljefe3 at 2:39 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2002]
[edit reason] no software drops please [/edit]

[chiyo]

No they are not crooks. (mainly). just good business people. Try getting your type of site high on google for targeted keywords or any other freebie. Good luck!

so what of that 40,000 do you spend on the SE's? Seeing they are delivering you targeted traffic they are just a form or promotion, and promotion for that type of product should be a major part of promotion expenditure anyway.

I sont really think there is much you can do apart from experimenting with ROI in various places, using different bids, promo copy, and so on. Experiment to come up with your best aggregated ROI and keep up with the changes.

Other than SE "tricks" which are short term only and will probably result in your being delisted entrely from some indexes.

Anyway, maybe someone else has some positive ideas.

[eljefe3]

Hi pjzak and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Whether you are aware of it or not, you are involved in a pretty competitve industry that either requires a lot of $$ going to pay per click engines, or some time studying keywords and targetting the less competitive terms so you can rank high in the free engines (google being the primary free engine). Use the overture tools provided to you as an advertiser and also other word tracking tools so you can see which phrases to target for your free traffic.

$40,000 in sales is quite a good amount of sales generated for your program. Have you figured out your cost per click and earnings per click so you can stay in the black? Figuring out how much it costs to procure one sale is an important stat for every webmaster who is in the affiliate arena.

Please take your time and read the various forums which might be helpful to you here (most every forum actually).

We look forward to hearing some good news from down the road.