Well, unless someone knows you have a product to offer, unless they know about your website ~ your shop if you will ~ and how to find you, then Nothing Will Happen. What to do? Where is your business going to come from?

"A Business with No Sign is a Sign of No Business"

Let's note that. We need to advertise. Advertising well leads to Visitors to our website, and they lead to buyers of our products. But first let's ask ourselves ~ what kind of visitors do we want coming to our site? Interested, focussed and ideally ready to buy ~ right?

Generally this will exclude the surfer or traffic exchange clicker. It's not traffic we want, it's sales and sales come from purpose led visitors. These are folk who know what they want or know they have a problem and want a solution to it.

Where are such visitors going to come from? We can either draw people to our site with skilful advertising ~ either online or offline ~ or we can cause visitors to be referred to our website.

Now for most websites, Richard D Moore, the President of Income Now! Marketing Masters, says "over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results".

Today I'm going to look at exploiting search engines. Concentrating on the probable major source of 90% of our business should bring the best initial return for us. We can look at the other 10% another time.

If 90% of our business is to come from search engines, what is our part in the process? What do we need to do? Google is the world's most powerful search engine ~ and the one more and more people are using. So start here.

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer ~ someone with a 'want' in front of a computer. Say, for example, you want to get a tennis racquet. You pull up the Google search page and type "buy tennis racquet" into the box and click search. Look at what displays.

The first ten or so websites out of a listing of 1,700,000 websites dealing with buying tennis racquets. Plus on the right hand side of this first page, about ten or so sponsored links, or adverts. There's quite a choice here, and most buyers will pursue their purchase from these entries. Maybe they'll try page two.

For sure, no one will check out each of the 1.7 million pages before making their buying decision, will they? And nor will you, will you? Probably you will make your choice from one of the listings on the first page, maybe the second. If you were looking for a very high value item, you might explore a bit further.

But maybe you would have searched Google with "buy tennis racket". For sure many people would use this alternate spelling and you can check for yourself the number of pages Google throws up.

Importantly for any of our advertising we need to cover all commonly used spellings.

So clearly as internet marketers, we need to exploit the one or two top ranking pages for specific customer search terms relevant to our product. This is a fundamental key to our profitability. I say again, exploit the one or two top search engine pages displayed for specific customer search terms.

Note that there are two factors involved. Beginning with the customers, with whom it is always sensible to start in marketing matters, we note it is the customer's specific input or keyword request which is the trigger of the search engine activity.

The second factor is the 'top page ranking' of the websites and the sponsored links. Obtaining a high or page #1 ranking for your website is clearly a most important goal for maximising sales.

There are many aspects to achieving this and is the activity of search engine optimisation ~ a topic for another day, or several days.

However, note this. Exploiting the search engine advertising displayed on page #1 ~ the Google Adwords ~ is much more readily achieved.

It is markedly easier and less expensive and quicker to obtain a page #1 listing for your Adword than to obtain a page #1 listing for your website.

And this advertising is amongst the most customer~targeted and customer~want~focussed advertising you can do. You pay per click. It is therefore the most effective.

Google Adwords enable you to control and measure the cost and effectiveness of your advertising while achieving your desired page #1 exposure.

At the same time you get the reassurance that you are paying only for visits to your website from customers who are specifically looking for your type of product.

Ideal marketing ~ and a recommended starting place for every online business.