March 18, 2005

A lot has been said in the past two years on paid inclusion and, more recently on B2B search engines and how they can help businesses of any size reach specific markets between vast industries.

However, there is one B2B search engine that has so far escaped the radar of some observers.

Launched in May of 2003, Global Business Listing (GBL) caters to small B2B firms, as well as medium-size and Fortune 500 companies.

At a time when many companies are spending anywhere from $5,000 to upwards of $25,000 and more a week in PPC advertising on search engines such as Google's AdWords or Overture, for only $99, any B2B company or small business can be listed in GBL. This is an annual fee, so it covers a whole year.

If you don't know much about paid inclusion or what these specialized search engines can do for a B2B company, then maybe this article will shed more light on the subject.

About six months ago, I had our company listed in GBL and so far, it has landed us two nice sales totalling over $600.

My sales manager was a bit skeptical when we signed up for it, but he was already paying over $150 a month in PPC with Google, so we both figured that just $99 more would'nt make that much of a dent in our advertising budget, so our company went along and did it.

Not only that, but, to my great surprise, a few weeks ago I typed in one of our main keyword-phrase in Google and our website is now listed as number two. You can see it here.

If you look carefully at that Google link, it points to the listing we have on GBL, not to our website. I'm not an SEO, just a simple sales representative where we offer press release outsourcing services, but I think that if we had'nt signed up in that paid inclusion program, our site would probably not come up as number two.

What I do know is that, prior to joining at GBL, we were almost nowhere to be found, not just in Google but also in Yahoo and MSN. Are we convinced now? I think we are.

Article by Rick Kelleger,
Sales representative,
Press Broadcast.

Rick Kelleger is a frequent contributor to B2B News.