Online Visibility Optimization – Free. But Not For Long

Last week we talked about UbiPlanet – an innovative social network from France. Today I have news from one more interesting French web service to share with you. The name is Ziki and it was only recently launched in the US.

Ziki was founded a year ago – and was originally launched for France only. Now that they target US users and prepare some exciting innovations (to be revealed this month), I wanted you to be able to use Ziki until the service gains momentum in the US.

First it was only intended to combine all your content on one website. It looked pretty good but it definitely needed something unique. And they have found something really exciting: last August they first tried to buy sponsored links from Google for their users. It seems that it was an unusual marketing tool – and it worked. And still works – their offer of sponsoring your name on Google, MSN and Yahoo! is limited to 10,000 people, and there are still over 3 thousand zikis to be created and sponsored by the company for free.

After creating your Ziki (with all your profiles, interests, tags, feeds, photos and videos) you will need to authorize Ziki.com to sponsor your name with major search engines. And so when someone types your name in the search name on Google, Yahoo! or MSN, they will first see your Ziki profile on top. And when they visit your Ziki, they will be able to access any online information you put here. Sure, if you are an experienced blogger or founder of a startup, you are most likely not particularly interested in promoting your own name with search engines – you only want to see your blog (website) on Google's first page (preferably top position, of course). But if you happen to be a freelancer in need of descent self-promotion – it is definitely a good idea.

And February is actually going to be a big month for Ziki: soon members will be able to buy sponsored links themselves through Ziki and manage these ads with their own budget and keywords. I think this sounds good – at least I doubt my name is frequently searched for online but some of the tags I want my name to be associated with are generally more interesting for users.

So when someone is looking for the keyword you want to be associated with, a sponsored link to your Ziki is displayed on the top spot on search engines. But of course, there will be the issue of price – which might prove to be high (or enormously high) for certain keywords. But some professionals who really want to be visible online would prefer to pay someone to ensure visibility for them instead of trying to deal with search engines advertising themselves. And this move makes more sense to me – and shows a business model. While I really hate being curious about the business model of giving away something that is usually paid for. Now we know how they are going to earn money. Stay tuned – I guess it will be interesting to see if the business model turns a success or not.