There is an old saying in advertising that if you're opening a restaurant, the most important thing you can have is not your location, your prices, your menu, or your chef. The most important thing you can have is a hungry crowd standing right outside. This is particularly true in marketing online, where it is easy to get lost in the masses of web sites that a hungry crowd can choose from. Yahoo Search Marketing helps you bring that hungry crowd of web traffic right to your web site.

Yahoo Search Marketing works on the pay-per-click model. Where traditional advertising requires you to pay just to get your ad in front of people - whether you get results or not - Yahoo Search Marketing charges you only for actual click-throughs from your ad to your web site. In other words, you pay only for people who visit your web site. You're paying for real targeted traffic, not just "eyeballs," to use advertising jargon.

In advertising, economies of scale are important. It stands to reason that not every person who sees your ad will click through to your web site, so you want as large a potential audience as possible. The more people there are in the viewing pool, the more likely you are to reach the people who most want your products or services. With Yahoo Search Marketing, finding potential customers is easy. Yahoo visitors perform 2.3 billion searches per month, which means that the target audience for your ad is huge.

Of course, you won't reach 2.3 billion people, nor do you want to. What you want to do is target keywords related to your business, and display your ad to people who search for those keywords. With Yahoo Search Marketing, you can choose your keywords, and determine your maximum cost per click on each keyword. You'll be advertising your restaurant to a hungry crowd, so to speak.

One of the most important ideas in advertising is testing. Even if your ad is pulling a large number of sales, there's always the possibility that it could bring in even more sales if just one word or aspect was changed. By testing small changes, you can determine which ads make you the most money, and spend your advertising resources on those ads. With Yahoo Search Marketing, you can set up multiple ads and automatically run the best-performing ad. The more you test, the better your advertising will work, and the more sales you will make. Yahoo Search Marketing makes it easy to test and fine-tune your advertising.

Your online business depends on advertising to bring in traffic. But that traffic is only worthwhile if it is truly targeted, and if you are putting the right ads in front of the right people at the right time. That right time is while they're searching for terms related to your products and services. With Yahoo Search Marketing, getting your best ads in front of people who want what you're offering is incredibly easy and affordable, meaning that you can sell more, with less effort, and build your business easily.