Blogs and Shopping

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I was just helping my wife look up some statistics on the web for a presentation she's doing next week when I ran into this interesting report from eMarketer:

DoubleClick reports that 41% of US online buyers say that they find the Web sites they use to research a purchase by using search engines, while 28% guess the site's URL and 13% respond to online ads.

DoubleClick developed a questionnaire with Beyond Interactive/Grey Worldwide for the survey of 2,000 US consumers conducted by Greenfield Online in December 2002.

WebSideStory reported last month that the number of people arriving at desired Web sites by using search engines or Web links has dropped from 51.9% in February 2001 to 35.6% in February 2003.

Though WebSideStory has determined that the number is slipping, the amount of Internet users reaching their desired site with search engines is still significant. And according to DoubleClick, even more are using search engines to find Web sites they can use to research a specific product or service.

So, even though the numbers are falling, a significant amount of people find what they want to buy using search engines. One has to think - if Google loves blogs... and people love to use Google to find products... then it seems to me that the Gizmodo model might actually be the way to go.

Attract the engines with content, then sell to the consumers who arrive to your site via the engines. It's a neat thought. I should start selling stuff, maybe pay for a bit of my bandwidth.

What to sell? Well, I should start making a running tally of the terms people use to arrive here, then start linking to Amazon via their referrer program. Kim Possible stuff alone could pay for my site and then some.

In fact, I could automate this with the Amazon API... Arrive here via a search and a product gets added to the page, just for you. Hehe. I love it. Is someone doing this?!?!

;-)

-Russ

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