Slowly but surely, Bing is building more bang.

For the third month in a row, Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing gained a slight increase in the U.S. search market. Accounting for 9.3% of U.S web searches for the month of August, a .4% increase from its July share of 8.9%, Bing continues to gain market share from its giant competitor, Google.

Similar data indicates that Google remained the leader of the U.S. search and advertising market with a 64.6% market share in August; this down 0.1% from July. Yahoo also dipped from a 20.1% market share to 19.3%.

While comScore reports on Bing’s rising popularity, it still finds that most Google users are still turning to old-faithful. That being said, Bing’s steady rise does present an attractive opportunity to affiliates who might be ready to try their optimization hand with another search engine, which for the time being remains less popular, but perhaps less competitive as well.

Here is what our experts recommend for affiliates that want to experiment with Bing to get more traffic:

1. Experiment with PPC on this engine to test the ‘keyword waters’. How does your keyword performance compare with your current Google campaign or past campaigns you have run?

2. If you own multiple sites you might want to create a site specifically optimized for Bing – remember that this may take some time to determine its success, so be prepared to invest 6-12 months on this project.

3. Set-up your additional affiliate marketing ID’s in your affiliate account to track traffic results and conversions. In Share Results you can create additional site profiles and track performance of specific key words using the ACID ID Tool. Speak to your affiliate manager to learn how you can set this up today!

4. Set-up monitor tools to monitor site performance with your favorite third part analytics account.

Here are some recommendations for merchants wanting to build their business with Bing:

1. Suggestions 1 & 4 that that we made for affiliates above, are equally important for merchants, plus:

2. Make sure your affiliate program is set up to support Bing. Have creatives such as text links featuring products that you think would work well with Bing (for example, your target consumers who would be using Bing), and clear policies about PPC.

By all reports, Bing is doing well—very well. Its user friendly and attractive design and useful way of sifting through information is, if nothing else, turning heads. Who knows if those heads will stay permanently glued to Bing, but the potential is definitely there.

Are you on board with Bing? We want to know!

The Bing search engine was launched by Microsoft in June 2009 and was followed in July by a search tie-up with rival Yahoo .