Just this past month Bing gained more of a percentage of market share than any of the other major search engines – up more than 22% from July, according to Nielsen. With Google’s perennial firm grasp on the #1 spot, this leaves Yahoo! and Bing to duke it out for numero dos…and Bing is gaining ground fast.

Until now, if you were thinking about expanding your search engine marketing campaign beyond Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) was the natural consideration; Bing (Microsoft Ad Center) not as much. But Bing just became a whole lot more appealing.

There’s a minimum amount of overhead required to start up and manage a search marketing campaign…and for some industries Microsoft’s search engines (MSN and Live Search) have traditionally not offered enough eyeballs to justify the time required to manage an ad campain on their platform. But as it gets closer to matching the number of searches on Yahoo!, Bing becomes more appealing to advertisers, and ad prices across all three of the top search engines could become a bit more competitive.

by flickr.com/sookie

Well, we’re not quite half way through 2009, and already it’s been a year of game changers for internet marketing. If you thought you hadn’t seen any good new ways to do business online lately, take a look at some of the newest players.

Microsoft released its new search engine (Bing) that experts are touting as a potential rival to Google’s search dominance; Twitter continues to be debated by the public, but embraced by businesses and marketers; and just last week Google itself announced the private launch of its apparently revolutionary online communication tool called Wave.

Add to this all the host of other popular “social media marketing” tools – like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, and oh yeah, don’t forget blogs – and you can see that long gone are the days of “if you build it they will come.” The game has been changing constantly since the internet became a legitimate avenue for marketing – and 2009 will be no different.

And yes, all of those sites named above can be effectively used to market your business. Want to learn more? Check out some of our most recent blog posts, or drop a line any time.

Nobody is suggesting that anyone is going to knock Google off its throne any time soon – it’s got to knock Yahoo out of the #2 spot first. Uh, wait, it already did…for a day. Since Bing is replacing Microsoft’s previous search engine (Live), it’s not exactly starting from scratch. Live’s 7% share of the search market is now Bing’s, which gives Bing a bit of a running start. Add to that all the fanfare surrounding Bing’s launch, and it actually surpassed Yahoo to take over the #2 spot for a day earlier this month.

So, why should you care?

For years businesses marketing themselves online have really only focused on “the rule of Google.” In other words, when you built a new website, you did it with Google’s guidelines in mind. Yahoo and MSN – afterthoughts. When you launched a new pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign, you did it on Google’s AdWords system first. Yahoo and MSN – maybe later. A true challenger to Google would change the way businesses are marketed online. It would add complexity, as search engine marketers try to abide by the guidelines of two major search engines; and it could also create opportunity for those looking to launch more cost effective PPC campaigns.

The big “if” is about whether Bing can live up to the hype. Microsoft, despite its deep pockets, has a history of hits and misses. But early reports indicate that it may have a winner with Bing. And well, just like Google, you can use Bing as a verb, too.