By Chris Desouza, Editor – Income Solutions - HBI

I started my own online business in 1998. I was convinced of its value. I was convinced that this is right thing for me to do, as it was one of most efficient way’s to start out on Internet as far as marketing was concerned.

But one fine day, it all came crashing down. I was a promoter for a certain group of companies. I made a better than average income. I made a lot of money for group of companies I promoted.

One fine day, when they went belly up, so did I.

Did you learn a lesson here?

I had nothing to hold on to! I had no real business of my own, I had no name brand, I had no product or service of my own. I, had nothing except my old commission pay stubs.

I was in business but I had no business of my own. I was without an image, without a brand name, without a business identity. I was just another promoter. A faceless promoter who needed to reinvent and re-introduce another marketing game plan.

I don’t have all answers to making it big on Internet. But I am convinced - buying an e-book where writer claims to make $100,000 won’t translate same for me.

I didn't recall that my product sales were unusually high that day, however. On review, I saw that my sales were almost double average number, but nothing extraordinary - and certainly not four times greater.

It took me a little while, but I finally figured out what happened to cause this huge spike in traffic and my advertising costs that day.

On one hugely popular keyword that receives several million searches at Overture in any given month, I usually try to maintain third position, as opposed to first. Past experience has taught me that third position has a much better conversion to sales rate than top spot.

In order to get and maintain a third place position, I bid 36 cents, which was just a penny lower than second highest bidder.

Bidding in this manner flies in face of conventional pay per click strategy, which suggests that I should bid one cent higher than next LOWER bidder, or 24 cents in this case. However, conventional strategy allows competitor in 4th spot to raise their bid by just 2 cents to regain his or her third place standing. Using my method, he'd have to bid thirteen cents more to gain placement above my listing.