This enlightening chat shed light on one of leading pay-for-performance advertising providers (providing keyword-targeted text ads to search engines and other large portals) and offered tips for achieving better results when purchasing keywords.

Craig began by giving some background information on FindWhat.com.

“FindWhat.com.com is a leading performance-based marketing company that introduces buyers and sellers online. We allow advertisers to bid on keywords, and then we distribute those keywords to over 200 distribution partners. We serve approximately 1 billion searches per month and handle well over 700,000 transactions per day. We have 20,000 plus advertisers from all over world.”

Craig is one of founders of FindWhat.com, and as a result of his strong dedication to developing FindWhat.com, he was recently chosen as one of nominees for 2002 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of Year Award.

Craig answered following questions from Academy students.

Question:

One billion is a very large number. How much of that comes from US?

Craig:

We concentrate on US marketplace at this point, so to put a percentage on it, I would say 95+% comes from US.

Question:

What is your vision for FindWhat.com? What are we going to experience in 2003?

Craig:

I've been hinting around on several earnings calls that we were looking at both international initiatives and diversifying our primary traffic (distribution partners). I would say both are strong possibilities for 2003.

Question:

Are there any major partners (in North America) that you could hint about?

Craig:

We recently announced a new relationship with Terra Lycos. We are providing a turnkey keyword advertising service to both Lycos and HotBot Web properties. They brand and sell service, and we provide our complete private label product comprised of keyword-targeted pay-for-performance ad service, account manager interface, and customer service.

Question:

My company just opened an account with you. Is there any way to automate our system for bidding purposes?

Craig:

We do offer several automated functions but have not focused on automating bidding process for several reasons. For example, if you have multiple bidders with a high "cap" and system automatically increases bids, then you would have artificial increases that give an unfair advantage to larger companies since they have larger budgets. This has recently been seen in other systems that have introduced such functions.

There are many other reasons, but important thing to understand about FindWhat.com is that we are focused on keeping a "fair playing field” for all advertisers. We feel there are many different ways to market a product online. But to date, there has not been a "fair" way for thousands and thousands of advertisers to participate. Again, we are focused on helping advertisers of all sizes rather than ones with largest budgets.

We feel that in long run, this will build a larger and stronger company.

Question:

What are your recommendations for a beginner pay-per-click client at FindWhat.com? For example, strategy, budget, etc.?

Craig:

Concentrate on your keywords and descriptions. Give our reps a call. As I mentioned earlier, we serve over 1 billion searches per month, so if you want to get traffic, you need to be identified by user as a site that has product they are looking for.

Question:

When bidding on your keywords, does FindWhat.com have an auto bid function to help reduce bid gaps between #1 and #2 position?

Craig:

We implemented several functions that help eliminate gaps you are mentioning. But if you really want to keep tabs on it, we suggest you log in frequently or contract a bid management company.

We do have a BidOptimizer feature, which will allow you to choose position you wish your keywords to obtain (positions 1 through 5) within FindWhat.com results. This feature also allows you to put in a maximum bid price. If, for example, keyword you wished to have number one position had a current bid price of $1.00, BidOptimizer would put your bid to $1.01, unless you had a max bid price of less than a dollar. In that case, it would put your bid at one penny over next possible bid position, within your cap limit.

Question:

In your opinion, what are top three mistakes made by new users?

Craig:

In this article, I will be discussing about meta tags. How to use them effectively without spamming. Its not just another article about meta tags. Read on to find out more.. Meta Tags are very important for your website's visibility. Many search engines read them from your site when you submit it to them. META tags were developed and made a HTML standard for purpose of addressing specific information about your web page that does not affect way your page actually looks.

1. Overstuffing Metatags : Believe me or not , there are still many people and web masters around who think that meta tags are magic bullet. Its not anymore. Mistake No. 1 : Stuffing keywords in Title Mistake No. 1 : Stuffing keywords in Description Mistake No. 1 : The keyword tag.

Mistake No. 1 : Stuffing keywords in Title I agree that its very important to include your main keywords in title tag. But there are certain things, which you should remember, as title tag is most important tag. · Title tag length should be within 70 characters or 8 words · Title tag should be meaning full and attract visitors · Use one to two keywords in title tag · Use plurals & concentrate on keyword phrases rather than just keyword. · Make sure that title tag is grammatically correct

Syntax of Title Tag :