Recently I’ve been receiving mail correspondence from my friends at LookSmart letting me know that they have automatically upgraded my client site listings to this wonderful new program. I naturally decided to have a look at details.

Upon further review I have found that because I had already paid entrance fees into their directory my sites would be grandfathered into new program. Isn’t that exciting? For new users setup fee is $49.00.

The documentation of this program says that on top of $49.00 setup fee new users will need to deposit a minimum of $150.00 to begin receiving clicks from directory at .15 cents per click. Again, for privileged customers such as I there is not a fee at this time because they are giving me 100 free clicks per month for next 20 months!

Okay, I know you are asking yourself what catch is right? Well, lets get a little deeper and take a look.

First off lets start with LookSmart letters. The letters state that to receive my free clicks I must login and activate my account before a July 11, 2002 deadline. Upon further review and in follow up correspondence from LookSmart I found this to be false as I have already been receiving clicks and have not yet activated my accounts.

In another letter from LookSmart I was told that my sites had reached their 100 free clicks per month limit and that my listings would be disabled until following month. This, is also un-true as listings are still active and when clicked take visitors to my sites.

Let’s face it folks, LookSmart has told us things in past that have also turned out to be un-true. Should we believe them this time when they say, “Small business listings are a great investment for my business.” This remains to be seen.

Let’s do a bit of math here, and focus on important issue at hand. Aren’t conversions really important issue? Website traffic alone is not our goal nor yours I am sure, you want to sell your products right?

Based upon fees and average conversion rates this is what I have concluded. At $49.00 for initial setup fee and a minimum of a $150.00 deposit this comes to $199.00. So, this $199.00 would buy you 1000 clicks at .15 cents per click. This comes out to, are you ready? A whopping average of 83 clicks per month over a 12-month period. Wow! Excited yet?

Okay so now you’re probably asking, “what ranking will my site have” and “how much traffic can I expect?” I also had these questions so I’ve done a little research and here are results.

Now, let's look at a "new" way to use Wordtracker, John's step- by-step approach:

To write this article, I came up with a real-life example and I started at step #1, just like you will do with your own site.

Let's say that your client sells aromatherapy supplies over Internet. Your first step is to try to determine target audience. Who would be buying aromatherapy supplies? One target audience would be people with stress in their lives who want to use aromatherapy as a way of relaxing. So, let's try that angle and see what we come up with.

* Go to Comprehensive Search at Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) and type in "relaxation." Click Proceed.

* Scroll toward bottom of page and click on "Check boxes off."

* Scroll back to top, and look at various choices. Remember that "Predict" column is predicted traffic you could expect to get for each of those keyword choices from all of major engines and directories in one day.

* Begin marking keyword ideas, all while thinking of a strategy to pull in traffic for your client's site through target audience.

* Scroll back to bottom of page and click on "Option 2: Competitive Search."

* Choose MSN and Google, since those two engines have potential of bringing in a lot of traffic to most Web sites. Of course, you can choose any two engines or directories that you'd like. Click Proceed.

* What did we find? "Relaxation" and associated words were not good choices, because KEI in comparison to projected traffic was too low. Targeting those keywords just wouldn't have been worth effort for such a low amount of traffic. Keep in mind that this is a real-life example, so this is certainly something that could happen to you when doing this strategy yourself.

* So, we went back to drawing board and tried "aromatherapy." Again, not a good example.

* Then, we tried "massage." After all, aromatherapy oils are used when giving massages, and people who are interested in massages would be a perfect target audience for aromatherapy supplies.

* After studying Wordtracker results for MSN and Google search engines for words that include "massage," we picked third result, "Techniques of Massage," because it's an excellent and appropriate angle for our client. The #1 result in MSN has a KEI of 3696, but it wouldn't work with our client's site. You have to be sure to choose keyword phrases that are appropriate for your particular client's site.

At MSN, "Techniques of Massage" has a KEI of 255. Within a 24- hour period, if your site was placed well in MSN engine, you could expect to get 90 visitors from MSN alone. What is your competition? 1954.

"Techniques of Massage" in Google has a KEI of 900, 165 potential visitors through Google alone in a 24-hour period, and competition of only 555.

Remember that a "good" KEI is anything over 100, and an "excellent" KEI is anything over 400.

Let's be honest here. You could manage a top 10 for this keyword phrase with your eyes closed (and your computer turned off).