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From time to time you may want to change the bid price of your bids, or to add or remove bids. Remember, the goal of marketing your site or service is to get the greatest volume of QUALIFIED potential buyers or users of your product -- and as a bonus, to get them at the time they are most likely to buy. I don't have a degree in marketing, but this concept seems pretty simple to me. So in the case of Overture.com, you want to exhaust your marketing budget as soon as possible, making sure only that the individual who views your page is interested in and ready for your services.

Managing your Overture.com account is fairly easy to do. You need to know your user name and password. Go to their Direct Traffic Center:

https://secure.overture.com/s/dtc/center/

and use the DirecTraffic Center Login to the Right. From there the current (9/2001) Overture.com menu has the following items:

Main
Manage Bids
Reports
Manage Listings
Money Manager
Support Center
Power Manager

With these options you can do pretty much anything, but we want to go to Manage Listings. You will notice that there are three options to manage listings, i.e. add, modify, and delete. Let's begin with add listings (because that is the one you will probably be doing the most).

Click on option A (Add Listings) and you will notice a form with four "sub-forms." These are what you will use to fill in your search terms (bids) There are five fields for each search term: the Term, Term Title, Term Description, Term URL, and Bid Price. You must bid at least .05 cents for each term.

My best advice is, read the help notes and learn. If you see a link to click on in the form, do so. A separate window pops up and you will not lose your place. As far as the Search term, Title, and Description, my advice is as follows:

1. Be sure and Capitalize a term if that is the way that you anticipate that the potential visitor to your site will type it in.

2. Include the search term in its exact syntax in the title and description as well.

3. Make the search term short, the Title a little longer, and the Description even longer still, but don't overdo it. Here's an example from the artistic licensing website (artisticlicensing.com)--
Search Term: John Planas
Title: Artwork by John Planas
Description: View licensable art for commercial use by acclaimed artist John Planas at the Artistic Licensing Website.

This allows the viewer to read more successively if it's what he/she wants (remember, qualify your viewers)

4. Enter .05 cents for ALL new bids. You will change that later from a second page. I will explain that later.

5. Plan for misspelling. If your search term is the name of an artist, Jerry Leibowitz, I suggest you also include a search term "Jerry Liebowitz" for those who aren't sure of the spelling.

6. Send the user to the right page. When you enter the URL that the search term will take the viewer to, send them to the page that actually talks about that subject. If you send him to the home page of your site, he may not know how to navigate to the information he wants.

7. Exploit what works. If you have a term that seems to be getting most of your traffic, think of other more obscure ways that term might be typed in. For example, if you are getting a good deal of traffic under "polishes," think about substitutes for each word in the phrase. Remember, you can have as many terms as you want, it only costs money when someone actually views your site. I came up with the following:

car polishes
furniture polishes
metal polish
(I could have written many more but you get the idea)

once you have these terms written down go to:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and type in each of these terms. You are going see how many people actually use that term per month on the internet. For example, "polishes" gets 8619 hits per month (last check), but also significant were silver polish, metal polish, car polish, and aluminum polish. You can bet that if you sell products specifically for this, you would want to be #1 on these terms, AND because they don't get that much traffic, your bids can be fairly low. If you want to see REAL heavy traffic, type in "sex"--kind of a sad commentary, but it gives you a frame of reference on what a "lot" of traffic is.

Once your bids are submitted, they are actually reviewed by a live person.

8. Be prepared for rejection. If the search term suggestion tools says that there are less than 500 searches using the term per month, Overture is likely to reject your term with the explanation "Insufficient Search." The reason is that they don't want their massive term database being clogged up with terms like "lefthanded Lithuanian clubs" and the like. If you're not getting at least 750 searches on that term per month, you should be looking for other more popular terms.

9. Don't cry over spilt milk. Accept that from time to time Overture may reject your term as not relevant enough. They are fairly picky; after all, their objective is to make money from your terms, but if they don't set high relevance standards, nobody will use their search engine.

Now change your Bid Prices: As I had mentioned before, you should enter .05 cents for ALL your search terms at the time you add them. They won't be online for a few days anyway. You'll be receiving an email when they are added online. When you receive the email, go to the same location (https://secure.Overture.com/s/dtc/center/) and click on Manage Bids. You will see all of your search terms now, including the ones you recently added. The advantage now is that you can modify just the bid information while looking at all of your terms, PLUS there is a column called "Bid to Become #1." If there is an amount there, you can easily decide your placement strategy without bidding more than necessary. If there is no amoere, it typically means that that term only has minimum bids by everyone at that time (.05 cents). In this case there is no competition, and a bid of just .06 cents puts you at the top.

You also have the option to Modify and Delete search terms. The modify terms part is a two-step process; first you will see a listing of all your current terms. Check the box next to the terms you want to modify, then click Modify. Deletion is similar; I didn't see anything difficult about either the delete or modify features.

If you are trying to build traffic to your site, I recommend you click on Reports in the menu and familiarize yourself with the reports provided.

Finally, take a look at the Support Center page. A mere 4 or 5 minutes reading through this resource will familiarize you with Overture.com very quickly. All things considered, I would rate Overture's site very highly in terms of layout, navigation, and user friendliness.