The internet advertising landscape has changed a lot in the last 10 years. The bubble has burst for many small business owners looking to make it big online. In 1999 you could easily put up a banner ad and drive traffic to your web-business (website business). Today things have changed dramatically. There are so many different ways to get people to see your web-business but there are also many more people trying to drive traffic to their own web-businesses.
Can you stand out in the crowd and succeed online? The simple answer to this question is YES YOU CAN SUCCEED, but it will not be as easy as some will let you believe.
Where do you start? This is a more complicated answer because in my opinion there is no one form of online advertising or marketing that is the end-all, be-all for the internet advertising business (One could say the same for offline advertising or marketing). Many people swear by Pay Per Click (PPC) while others do nothing but email marketing.
The truly successful businesses use a multitude of methods to drive customers to their web-businesses; they do not rely on only one or two methods. Successful businesses test and measure the results from the different sources and adjust their campaigns to continually improve the results. Without taking the time to test and measure you will never know the true potential of your online advertising.
Testing and measuring online begins with your website. Do you understand how effective or ineffective your website is with regards to driving sales? Do you have an analytical program running on your site that shows you which pages are creating sales road blocks? Is your content clean and professional? Are your site layout & graphics professional? Can you fully monetise the traffic once you start bringing them to your site? What are your competitors doing with their web-business? These are just a few of the questions you need to fully assess before spending money on driving traffic to your web-business.
Aft! er you h ave assess and improved the effectiveness of your website, the next step is to see what types of free marketing you can use to test your website performance. The social networks like facebook.com, twitter.com and youtube.com are becoming the best ways to test your sales pitch and website without spending a lot of money. You need to be careful when using the social networks for business purposes because they are not truly designed for business marketing. A good soft sell strategy works well here. Another free way to drive traffic to your website is via search engines like google.com and yahoo.com. Using search engine optimization (SEO) to get your site listed effectively in the top 10 search engines (for your target keyword searches) will provide low cost visitors to your site as long as there are searches for your product or services.
Once you have fully implemented all the free marketing tools available it is time to move into the paid advertising arena. As mentioned earlier you need to spread your advertising dollars around, while testing and measuring the effectiveness of all your advertising. My professional opinion is that you need to have a diverse blend of CPM, CPC & CPA priced campaigns on the display, video, text and email marketing platforms. The targeting of your campaigns depends entirely upon the type of product or service you are offering and the demographics of the people who will potentially purchase them. DO NOT stick to one platform or one cost model until you have fully tested and measured the other platforms and pricing models.
The combined testing and measuring of your web-business, marketing campaigns and search engine optimization are all needed to effectively advertise online in 2009. Explore advertising platforms and pricing models to find the right fit for your product or service. Some will say that PPC is the only way to advertise but I know many businesses that have a lower return on investment (ROI) using email marketing and CPA banner ad campaigns, than the! y can fi nd using PPC. Others have the opposite ROI situation, but the only way to determine what is best for you is test and measure everything. Yes, it takes time to test and measure but in the long run you will find more effective online advertising in 2009 using these techniques.
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