The Mind of Vatke
Thoughts, Musings and Advice by Andre Vatke

For anyone running a website or doing any search marketing, this weeks news that Microsoft bid $44.6 billion to buy Yahoo was huge. Microsoft is looking to gain some ground on their biggest search marketing rival Google. Yahoo also has the top market share in online display advertising with 19% or the market compared to Google’s 1%.

More interesting than strategic buyouts is how Google dethroned Yahoo as the search king and left MSN a distant third. The lessons for anyone building a business of any kind are significant and overlooked by those pushing mainstream get-rich-quick nonsense.

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Not that many years ago Yahoo was the number one search engine online. Easily 80% of our website search referral came from Yahoo. The rest was occupied by Infoseek, Lycos, AltaVista and other search engines that have signed up with Google or died out altogether. Today search referrals come mainly from Google. Seeing Yahoo or MSN requests is a rare occurrence.

But how did the underdog Google beat everyone else to dominate the search market?

Was it savvy or strategic marketing and heavy-handed vendor tactics like Microsoft?

Was it being first to market like Yahoo? Remember too that in addition to being the original search king, Yahoo bought Overture which invented PPC a good three years before Google got into it.

It wasn’t either of those…

Google’s focus was not on beating competitors as much as it was focusing on a simple mission, which according to Google is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

What, no big marketing message?

For those that don’t remember, the Google revolution started among the techies and early Internet users. Finding what you were looking for using a search engine was a hit or miss affair. Google simply did a better job connecting the searcher with what they were looking for.

Google had another secret…

Google was in no hurry to cash in on their more relevant search capability. There were no ads on Google and the interface was simple and easy to use. Google spent years quietly attracting loyal search users. In fact, Google has a history of spending large sums of money to develop new businesses without rushing to make money back.

Meanwhile, both Yahoo and MSN looked for every penny inside every search selling search advertising well before Google. Yahoo even went so far as to charge website owners to be listed in their directory – something search engines normally did for free. While some argue that this presented higher quality sites in Yahoo searches (Yahoo directory listings are human reviewed), it also cut them off from the bulk of new sites making a find in Yahoo less likely.

While Yahoo has not accepted the offer, odds are that Microsoft will get their wish. How that will play out for search marketing remains to be seen. The lessons for network marketing are here right now for the taking…

1) Your product/service matter. Success is more than just a winning marketing message. Your product or service is an integral part of that message. If you over promise and under deliver you will never gain customer loyalty and end up working a lot harder than you really need to.

2) Don’t rush the money. Being in a hurry to monetize a website or make quick cash from a network organization will increase the risk of turning off the very people that have the collective capacity to create a monetary situation. Find a true mission and focus on that at least twice as much as you focus on money.

3) Real success takes a lasting commitment. Whether it’s getting a new website running or having a thriving network marketing organization, think about what you want to accomplish two years out, then think backwards from there to create an action plan. Remember that your plan must be realistic – are you willing/able to give it what it will take to get there? If not, don’t give up. Instead modify your goal or plan.

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Does Google have any competition? Google knows they need to stay relevant in order to keep users. No users, no ad revenue. And there are a number of great startup search engines like www.mooter.com ready to be the next Google.

To your success, :-)
Andre Vatke, Founder
Leaders Club