Free Marketing - Yes, even with CSE’s

Here are 3 places where you can still find some good, old fashioned free marketing.

1) Froogle, GoogleBase, Google Product Search

The biggest is from the e-comm juggernaut, Google. Google Product Search, which is built on top of GoogleBase, which takes over for the formerly known as Froogle comparison engine was originally rolled out years ago, but Google Product Search (GPS) is not as big as it once was. A significant amount traffic was lost when the Froogle link was removed from the Google home page and replaced with Google Video. However, the site is still bigger than most, and will certainly make a push to rival Amazon.com and eBay by adding shopping cart functionality with Google Checkout. Even though large already, this is the sleeping giant of comparison engines and marketplaces. Once a solid and firm direction develops, exponential growth will follow.

2) MSN Live Product Search Beta

This is another sleeper which seems to be on the heels of GoogleBase as a place to submit products with the possibility of expanding to other areas. MSN Shopping is already a large site, but should not to be confused with the MSN Live version. This version is still in the beta (aka free) stage. The nice thing about MSN Live Beta, is that it’s:

A. Backed by a large corporation, showing good long term stability

B. New, so there is a very little competition from potential rival merchants.

C. Searchable by Google, so the listings appear in MSN Live’s search, and also as results in a regular Google search. This means essentially you can have Google picking up not only on GPS, but also Live submissions on the same page, potentially giving double coverage for free!

3) TheFind.com

TheFind.com is also in beta but features a robust selection, and for the purposes of this article, is most importantly free. TheFind features the ability to have a bot scan your product pages and list the selection on their site, instead of having to configure a product file. Whether the site stays free depends on the company’s internal strategy, but for now it offers another great source of qualified traffic.

June 22nd, 2007