The Pay for Performance or P4P was originally invented by Overture. Overture observed that the internet was growing into a unique kind of shopping mall, where people could shop conveniently and easily and that advertising was gaining grounds on the internet. But now, Overture has been taken over by Yahoo and hence popularly known as Yahoo.

A visible and popular website attracts more and more people. It provides ads in other sites that link to a particular site can direct potential consumers and customers to that site thus increasing traffic and sales in that website. Yahoo provides a service using which it is possible to show ads kept in their websites when people input certain keywords.

Using Yahoo services, any willing website can have their traffic increased by utilizing the same. When more and more people become aware of your site, the traffic to your website would automatically increase. This in turn would increase the chance of people viewing your pages and products. Even if a small fraction of those people actually buy your products; that would still mean a substantial figure for you and your company.

It is the goal of every internet based company to get a high volume of potential consumers to their website. To accomplish this, the companies try a handful of methods to make their website more and more popular and make the people all over know about the existence of their services.

Yahoo/Overture is very similar to Googles Adwords. Both of them use the same principle in showing ads according to keyword or keyword phrase searches. Whenever someone types in a phrase or a keyword in their search engine, the result page shows the usual results and along with it, shows the ads matching the search criteria on the right side of the same page. These ads in turn link to the websites of the respective companies.

As an example, let us consider that you run a car parts retail/wholesale site and you have chosen for Yahoo/Overture services, choosing some keywords that can trigger your ad to be displayed. Then, if somebody searches for Honda Accord, your ad might show up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. Using this system, you dont even need to optimize your website with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

With some labor and work, you can make your site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search and you would have the chance of your site being displayed on the top of the list or at least, on the first page of a search result, thus increasing your chance of people clicking on your links. This is a fast way to have traffic and visitors to your website.

However, remember that this service is not free. There are different ways in which Yahoo/Overture might charge you. They could charge in the number of keywords or keyword phrases your as uses or in the number of times your ad gets clicked on. Similar services might offer other features like having your ad show up on some third party sites, besides showing it on the search result page. You should look out for those.

Some third party supports placing ads that have similar content to that of the site. The more sites your ads are shown, the more is the chance of getting visitors to your site, especially, if the site where your ad is shown is a popular website.

With the internet being the largest network and still growing and which has shrunken the whole world into a global village, with online businesses mushrooming, it is high time to start advertising and surge ahead in this rat race of getting visitors to your site. Yahoo/Overture is a great place to make a start. There are many who have used Yahoo/Overture and have had great success. It is a market strategy which will direct swarming traffic to your site and that in turn will boost your sales and result in profit.

Often it is seen that to make money, you require money. But by using services like Yahoo/Overture and other such types of low cost or free market strategies, it is often possible to get overwhelming results faster and on a big scale. Many of the online companies have learned this fact the hard way. Your company should, however, not be one of them.