At the beginning of the week, Yahoo announced that they are going to be launching their biggest marketing campaign in years. This no doubt comes in response to the influx of Ask.com advertisements that have been strategically interspersed throughout your favorite television programming.

According to this article found on CNET News, Yahoo will advertise heavily on tv, radio, online and yes, even in movie theaters.

So what will come of Yahoo's latest marketing push? We'll have to wait and see.

What we can expect is shiny new ads that incorporate the old "Do you Yahoo" tagline, as well as a bit of humor about the world without Yahoo.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to watch the advertisements and see what Yahoo has come up with in their massive push to remind everyone that they are still relevant and cool.

  "Click Fraud," gets cover story treatment in the October 2, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek.

It's an insidious problem, one exacerbated by the fact that it often is not readily detectable. The BusinessWeek focuses largely on the experiences of Martin Fleishman and his site www.MostChoice.com.

Martin is a firm believer in online advertising, but he's had that faith rattled by the discovery that of the $2 million he's paid Google and Yahoo!, at least $100,000 was the result of click fraud. And the only reason he ever picked up on it was because he took the time to check where the clicks were coming from and discovered a number coming from such places as Botswana, Mongolia and Syria.

Had he not poured through his data, he would have remained oblivious of the problem.

Basically, as near as he can determine, at least 5% of the clicks he paid for were fraudulent. He may actually have missed a few that were better hidden in the data; it's current estimated that fraudulent clicks can amount to as much as 20% of an ad's clicks.

So what's an advertiser to do?

Well, you can pour through the data, as Martin did, and try to discern which clicks might be fraudulent, but that can be time-consuming, costly and, if you don't know what you're looking for, fruitless.

You can also turn to companies that have developed fraud detection technologies, such as that offered by Zunch Communications' popular Click Fraud Detective.

As Google, Yahoo! and other search engines continue to seem reluctant to deal with the issue head-on (in the BusinessWeek story, Martin recounts how Google refused to do anything for some time, despite compelling evidence he provided regarding fraudulent clicks), using an established professional service like Click Fraud Detective is a good bet for both detecting click fraud and recovering from the search engines for its costs.

Maybe you've heard about the The Long Tail. Maybe not. Whether you have or not, it may well be a factor in your future marketing efforts.

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in his article of the same name which appeared in Wired magazine in 2004.

Anderson readily admits that the actual theory is not his. However, he's the guy who has taken a relatively obscure theory and made it easily identifiable, both in terms of what to call it and as to what its effect on marketing is.

The theory behind The Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits," e.g., hit movies and hit CDs, at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward an increasingly large number of niches in the tail.

Here is a graphical presentation of The Long Tail --

 Maybe you're saying to yourself, "Yeah, so...?"

Here's the "so." With the advent of the Internet, the "Long Tail" portion of the graphic is proving to be near infinite, i.e., there is a near unlimited universe of niche markets that have previously gone largely untouched..

I'm going to ask you to follow me through a little Economics 101 to explain the graph and its importance.

The dark orange section, the "head" of the graph is representative of the "hits" in marketing. The big sellers. For example, this summer's movie hit is "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." If this were a graph of box office results, "Pirates" would be found squarely in the dark orange portion of the graph-- the head.

In fact, "Pirates" has actually taken in about one-third of box office receipts for the entire year, and that's in a universe of hundreds of movie releases.

As the tail extends out, sales volume decreases, meaning movies falling within the Long Tail section had fewer and fewer sales. Which usually translates into fewer and fewer profits. In fact, it frequently translates into losses.

Two points though. At one time, it was assumed that as the tail extended out, demand ended, or at least reached a point where there was insufficent demand to justify supply. That meant that if Widget "A" was a best seller, and Widget "X" was rarely sought after in stores, Widget "X" was not available. Sales were simply not enough to justify stocking Widget "X" for the occasional person who wanted it.

Pretty much classic supply and demand inventory and sales theory.

Stay with me now, we're getting to the good part.

But now, move forward into the Internet era.  With the Internet, there is no need for a "bricks-and-mortar" store to sell products. An example would be a comparison of Blockbuster and Netflix. The average Blockbuster store carries about 3000 titles. And they've carefully determined which movies to carry, those being the ones that they can count on being rented and sold on a relatively regular basis.

If a DVD only rents a few times a quarter, it's not worth having it on the shelf, taking up space. So they don't carry it.

Contrast that with Netflix, which carries an inventory in excess of 15,000 titles. Netflix can set up a few warehouses scattered across the country, rather than having to have a store in thousands of neighborhoods. A huge cost savings right there.

Because its storage and distribution costs are so much lower than Blockbuster's, Netflix can afford to store that film that rents only a few times a quarter. It doesn't need a copy in a thousand different stores like Blockbuster does. It just needs a few copies to meet a relatively small demand.

And Netflix makes a profit off of that movie that Blockbuster doesn't carry, even though it rents only a few times per quarter.

The point?

Niche markets. The Long Tail graphically represents what Netflix, Amazon, E-Bay and thousands of other online marketers have shown-- there is a near infinite marketplace of niches out there. Find a niche and it can be profitable for a business on the Web where it might not even exist in the Bricks-and-Mortar world.

Because of these niche markets, online music services, line Rhapsody, have subcategories within subcategories of music downloads available. It costs Rhapsody next to nothing to store and offer obscure music. But a Bricks-and-Mortar retailer can't do it. The cost is just too great.

Rhapsody can afford to store a music download that may only be downloaded once a quarter, and still make money off of it. Admittedly, that single download isn't worth much, but multiply one download of thousands of obscure recordings per quarter, and you're talking serious money.

What The Long Tail shows us is that there are hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of niche markets waiting to be found and exploited. Before the Internet, these niches were non-existent or nearly non-existent.

And cumulatively, these niches represent a huge marketplace.

Which beings us to what all this has to do with Search Engine Marketing.

If you have a product or service you are selling on the Internet, examine it closely and determine if there is a niche market you may be missing. Is there some application of your product you haven't considered for which a niche market exists?

Are there prospects out there that you are missing because you haven't targeted them with your marketing?

Find a niche (or niches). Market to it. And profit.

Target those niches. Create additional websites for your product or service that aim squarely at those niches. Create a site and then focus your SEO and SEM efforts on attracting those niche prospects. There's no telling how many sales you might be missing out on because you are failing to reach niche prospects.

And if you need help doing this, you know who to call. 

Referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=callaway+golf+clubs&btnG=Google+Search

According to MarketingSherpa's annual Benchmark Guide, the average company marketing on the Web spent 88% of their budget on paid search ads. Conversely, the average company marketing on the Web spent only 12% of their budget on search engine optimization (SEO).

Wow. That's a huge disparity.

It also may be a monumental waste of money.

Why?

Call it the Southpaw Eye Ball Effect

We naturally read left-to-right. And that is exactly how most people read on their Internet searches.

Eyetracking studies have conclusively found that most people surfing the Internet pay little attention to, much less click on, the paid ads appearing in the right column. They tend to focus on the top left corner of the page and move down from there.

So, at least with Google, the average searcher sees the two ads at the top of the page, assuming someone has purchased those spots, and the 10 organic listings that follow.

This doesn't mean that the ads in the right column are useless. Only that a smaller portion of potential prospects are paying attention to them and clicking on them. And if you've just started marketing on the Web, those Pay-Per-Click (PPC) spots may be your best bet for attracting prospects, since your site may not even be listed in the organic searches for as long as 8-12 months.

Paid ads are also helpful when you're not finding yourself in the top ten listings in the first few search pages.

This also doesn't necessarily mean that the paid spots appearing above the organic search results are great investments. The ROI on these spots is dropping all the time as your competitors bid against you for those prime spots, boosting the cost of advertising there. In fact, it's estimated that the cost of those coveted spots are going up by at least 25% a year, probably quite a bit more in some cases.

Still, those two spots above the organic searches do garner more attention than the PPCs in the right hand column.

But while paid ad costs are rising, the cost of a click on the organic listings remains--

Zero. Nada. Nothing. 

A prospect can click on your organic result ten times and it costs you nothing. But let them do the same thing on a PPC result, and it's costing you money every time they click it.  

And searchers tend to pay attention to all ten organic search results. While the top three results get nearly a 100% viewing, there is very little drop-off in viewing for the remaining seven organic results. Which is why having a top ten spot in organic searches is so coveted among marketers.

Yet many of those very same marketers fail to focus their budgets where the most prospects are to be found.

Organic Search Can Increase Site Traffic by 38% or More

According to MarketingSherpa, if you are paid ad number five in the right hand column, just .6% (less than one out of 100!) of viewers who click on paid ads will choose you.

But if you're number five in the organic searches on the same page, 8.6% (nearly nine out of every 100) of viewers who click on organic listings will choose you.

And that difference translates into increased traffic for your site.

Marketers who conduct search engine optimization campaigns were asked how their overall site traffic had changed in the six months since they began their campaign. Marketers using in-house resources said overall site traffic rose 38%.

Even better, marketers who outsourced their search engine optimization efforts to an outside expert saw average site traffic grow 110%.

Just multiple your current site traffic by 110% and see what kind of results you could be getting. What would an increase like that do for your bottom line?

Spend Your Money Where the Prospects Are

What portion of your budget is devoted to SEO? Are you like so many others spending 88% of your money on paid advertising, when SEO has a much better ROI? Maybe it's time you reconfigured your marketing budget and devoted a greater portion to SEO.

However, don't necessarily pull all of your paid ads. Eliminate the least successful ones, but keep those that are getting results and returning a decent ROI. A good marketing mix should include both paid ads and SEO.

Just don't shortchange the SEO portion of your budget. You're probably costing yourself money. 

Has anyone else noticed the indented subcategory links that have a tendency to appear under the first listing in Google? For example, if you search for “Kodak” in Google you can see that the first result is immediately followed by another set of indented links for specific pages within the Kodak site.

So what are these links?

According to a post by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Watch, Google is now calling them “sitelinks”. Apparently they are a permanent addition to Google search. While they only appear for the first result in Google, they do not necessarily show up for every search. However, I did notice them appearing more often when searching for brand or company names.

Sitelinks. So now we know.