Microsoft and Ask.com come to small businesses' aid

Small online businesses, rejoice! Global search engine industry giants have come to the aid of your betterment. Microsoft and Ask.com have joined hands to come up with a special scheme, wherein Microsoft Office Live users can get advertising access from Ask.com.

Office Live adManager's beta advertising service will now comprise this special service. Now you can access and manage your keyword advertising accounts directly. In fact, you also have the option of buying advertisements from MSN, Live Search and Ask Sponsored Listings.

Online marketing experts are more than happy with this latest development. In fact, top bosses of Microsoft are going gaga with the coming together of two extremely popular search engines – the first collaboration of its kind. This 'contextual targeting' service is being touted as a platform for small businesses to understand and work on search engine marketing modules.

This scheme is all set to give Google's AdSense programme a tough run for its money. The latter has been extremely successful mainly because it has not faced strong enough competition in the market. With the advent of this power-packed collaboration, Google's might is surely to be put to test.