Overture (http://www.overture.com), a company founded in 1997 to link up small businesses and major search engines and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo!, Inc., is providing just that service.

Today, Overture has over 100,000 businesses paying for keyword results who receive over 170 million visits going into their sites each month.

The basic premise is that through partnerships created with many of the top search engines, including AltaVista, CNN, ESPN, Excite, Go2Net, InfoSpace, MSN and Yahoo, small businesses are able to bid on what they are willing to pay in order to be listed in the top three positions for search results for specific key words.

To keep things fair, there are tools available to see what the current bids are, how many searches were performed, how many click-throughs were recorded and the monthly fee associated with that.

In fact, the click-through rate is actually what determines how much you pay.

With traditional Internet advertising models, it is normal to pay based on how many views or impressions your ad receives. In contrast, one of the major selling points to Overture is you only pay when someone clicks on your link and goes through to your site. And, that is what is meant by the term click-through or price-per-click.

For a specific example of how this could work for a company in our community, I entered the generic key word "rv park" into the Overture research tool.

Their data then showed that 10,178 people searched for that key word in November 2003. The current bid for the top position is 33 cents. Approximately 500 clicked on that keyword result. Therefore, it cost that advertiser about $165 for those 500 customers to click through to their site.

If that sounds expensive, keep in mind that those are 500 people that had already done a keyword search for your product or service so they should be very targeted customers resulting in a very high visit-to-sale ratio.

Also keep in mind that this example was based on a very generic key word.

You can sign up for any keyword combination and as many combinations as you like. A much more targeted approach would be to sign up for yuma rv park, Arizona rv park, az rv park and others like that.

This targeted approach will have two consequences.

First is it will result fewer clicks. It is just a fact that more people will search for rv park than yuma rv park. And, fewer clicks means less cost (remember, you pay per click) but also less customers, which translates into fewer sales.

The second consequence is a lower cost-per-click. Because these targeted keywords will be less popular than generic ones, there is less bidding competition to drive up the cost.

As you can imagine, extremely popular keywords such as "home mortgage" or "airline tickets" used by national companies can be extremely expensive to bid on.

On the other hand, sticking to more targeted keywords will tend to be far less expensive. Many are still available at the minimum starting bid of 10 cents.

Of course, there is a catch. No matter what your bidding campaign ends up costing, you are obligated to have a minimum spend of $20 per month. And, even if your clicks don't add up to that amount, your account will be charged that minimum fee regardless.

So, the trick is to make sure you don't get outbid and to make sure you are listed in enough different keyword results so you get at least $20 worth of clicks each month.

Other than that, I recommend that anyone looking to promote a Web site on a small budget look into Overture and purchasing specific key word results.