IT Milk: entry

FindGift.com is the most popular vertical search engine targeting web surfers who are searching for gifts. In contrast to search engines like Google and MSN, a vertical search engine searches within a thin slice of web content; using search engines like FindGift.com usually finds more relevant results, especially for personalized graduation gifts.

FindGift.com is unique in that it is not a normal price comparison shopping site like Nextag or Froogle. When you first hit FindGift.com’s home page, it prompts you with the following question: “Who is this gift for?” with a few options like him, her, or a family. In other words, FindGift.com helps the gift-buyer along the way by systematically narrowing down the gifts by occasion, type, meaning, and price. Eventually, after digging down into couple of levels of prompts, the searcher should find the perfect gift at the right price.

FindGift.com’s Paid Inclusion Model

All products stored inside FindGift.com’s database are paid listings. However, their paid inclusion system is not based on the richest-asshole-wins scheme used by normal PPC engines. Rather, the product rankings are determined by the popularity among the visitors.

So what is this “popularity” system used by FindGift.com? It’s basically determined by CTR (click-through rate): how many people show interest in your product by clicking on it when presented with a variety of other choices within their search criteria.

Also, since there is not a bidding system, there is a flat CPC rate for all participating merchants: $.15 per click. This CPC rate is very cheap when compared to Adwords or adCenter, because the general market for gifts is so competitive that you pay $.80 to $2.00 to rank in the top 3 positions for most keywords.

Improve Your Rank On FindGift.com

The following are tips on how to SEO your products on FindGift.com. Keep the following in mind while you search engine optimize:

• The merchant with the most clicks wins
• But you will be charged $.15 for each click, so you will only shoot yourself by clicking like crazy on your own product links. FindGift.com would love that because it just means more money for them with no ROI for you.
• Just like everything else in life, it becomes easier to remain at the top as you approach the upper percentile

The trick is to search your own product title on FindGift.com and find the product link. In the search results, hover the cursor over the product title or in Firefox right-click and “copy link location” for a url that looks like this: http://www.findgift.com/cgi-local/clk.cgi?pid=65219… (try clicking on this link and it will redirect you to the actual merchant site).

Next, in your ecommerce script, use this link as the hyperlink for your More Info or Buy It Now buttons. This way, when customers who come to your site from another traffic source click on one of these call-to-action buttons, it will register into FindGift.com’s system as a click in their database. Sure, you will pay $.15 for that pseudo-click, but you will most likely make a conversion from that click AND boost your rankings in FindGift.com. It’s a win-win situation.