I've used those $100 services before that "submit to 100s of search engines". And I've also used google adwords. In my opinion, the $100 is well spent if you're looking to get listed quickly. Organic can take a while, but so too can the paid services.
In my experience the paid services basically just have an auto submitter that submits to the 100+ sites. It's a great time saver because if you did it manually, it's going to take you days to complete. The only catch is that the submissions take just as long to get a response from the search engine. The good "bulk submitters" out there will give you a report (usually via email) of all the sites they submitted to, success and failure on those sites, and average time to get listed. Most search engines take between 2 weeks and 8 weeks to actually get a submission into their system.
If you need immediate presence on "the net", then ad words is the way to go (or the msn or yahoo equivilants). You get instant exposure on thousands of sites. But it can be far more expensive. There are companies that literally spend thousands / day on that stuff.
One suggestion that might work is to get a site, basic skeleton (with content) up right now and get a few links in from other sites. This will at least make the search engines aware that you exist. Then when you're ready to launch, you'll already have a foot in the door.
|