Posts Tagged ‘pay per click advertising’

Diversity The Beauty Of Web Marketing

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

The beauty of online marketing is that you don’t have to settle for one channel. Diversity is the key to success, both online and off line. In fact, we recommend diversifying your Web marketing strategies for more effectiveness.

Some of the methods of online marketing for small businesses that others have found successful in the past include:

  • Pay per click advertising
  • Article marketing
  • Blog marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Search engine marketing
  • Link building
  • Site sponsorship
  • Video marketing
  • Podcasting
  • Content aggregation

And this is just to name a few.

The best way to diversify your Web marketing efforts is to start with one or two methods of marketing and work them until you meet with some level of success. Then, add another method of marketing but don’t stop what you’ve been doing. Every month (or three months), add a new marketing tactic to the methods you are currently working and if a marketing tactic isn’t producing results after three or four months of actively using it, drop it.

For instance, perhaps you start with blog marketing and pay per click advertising. Work them for three months and monitor your results. In the third month you might add article marketing. Let’s say you’ve been spending $100 month on PPC advertising and blogging every day. You can add article distribution with 5 new articles a day and see how that affects your marketing efforts.

After three months you should evaluate your marketing plan to see what is working. If pay per click marketing isn’t delivering a positive ROI, try to find out why and make a change. Remember, diversity is key if you want your Web marketing efforts to pay off.

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Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »

Generate Site Traffic with Pay per Click Ads

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Pay per clicks can be a shortcut to building traffic for your site.
In fact, some larger companies are foregoing SEO and going straight to pay per click (PPC).
Is PPC feasible for small business owners? It’s certainly worth considering the pros and cons.

The basic premise of pay per click is that you pay each time one of your ads is clicked on.
So instead of finding your keywords, optimizing your site and searching for innovative ways to link and get linked, you simply “buy” your way to the top of the search engine mountain of success.

Google AdWords is one useful type of PPC, now Yahoo! and MSN have their own version.

It’s relatively simple to set up a PPC account.
For example, on Google, all you have to do is go to Google Adwords, register, give them your credit card number, and you’ll have an account. From there, you create an ad (with a title, text, and a link to your web page), and then choose your keywords that will guide traffic to your ad (you can’t get away from keywords no matter what). The next step is to then bid on those keywords.

How do you know what to bid?

Your goal is to be in the top three bidders for this keyword.
Any pay per click company you use will list their ad prices. See if this is something you can afford. Being in position three has its advantages–you pay less and you still get “seen” often. Because the pay per click system is determined by many factors such as quality, click throughs, and other factors, being in the number one position isn’t always worth the extra monetary output.

Two Types of Pay per Click Ads:

• Search engine ads are just that. These PPC ads will be placed on search engines.

• Content match ads are placed on websites and will be distributed throughout that system. For example, Google AdWords are distributed throughout the Good AdSense program, so this type of pay per click ad will show up on a variety of sites.

The Pros of Pay per Click Ads:

• It’s dependable. If you have the money, it’s pretty much a sure bet to generate web traffic quickly. By quick, I mean within days or weeks as compared to months, if not years of building your site’s recognition by natural search (when people just type in a word or phrase). Also, PPC’s don’t experience as much fluctuation, so you don’t see the daily ups and downs that occur otherwise.

The Cons of Pay per Click Ads:

• You have to pay, and sadly, it’s become popular and the prices are still going up.
• Natural searches work as well and shouldn’t be ignored. Ideally, PPC’s should be used as a part of your promotional campaign and not its entirety.

Nothing is guaranteed, but pay per clicks can be a great tool to help small businesses get established fast. The secret is to do some research and get those all important keywords nailed so that whether your clients find your site through a natural search or through a pay per click, those keywords will draw the right viewers straight to your website.

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Posted in PPC for Small Business, SEO for Small Business, Small Business Internet Marketing, Tools for Small Business, Uncategorized, search engines, website development | No Comments »

Blogging Is Less Expensive SEO Alternative With Huge Benefits

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Ambar Shrivastava of MediaPost’s SearchInsider wrote a great article on company blogging for small- to mid-size companies who don’t want to invest thousands of dollars into SEO. The alternative, he says, is blogging. And even more striking, he says that blogging offers a more affordable way to reach audiences with the speed of pay per click advertising.

He’s 100% correct. You can set up a blog in just a couple of hours and be blogging to it in no time. The process is really simple and the blog software that I recommend is free so there are no upfront costs – unless, of course, you hire a ghostwriter to write the blog for you. Even if you hired a full-time blog manager to manage your blogging for you, you’d spend less money overall than you would by hiring that same person to manage a PPC campaign.

In his article, Ambar Shrivastava says:

Blogging may not be the long-term solution for fixing a broken site, but it will get your foot in the door for SEO, deliver results in the short term, and facilitate the process of getting buy-in for full-scale, long-term SEO projects for the rest of your Web site.

While his insights are true for the most part, I’d add that you can use blogging as a long-term SEO strategy as long as you don’t rely on it alone. You’d want to some other things as well to supplement blogging, or use blogging to supplement your other initiatives. But you can start the blogging first and get quicker results in the short term while working toward your long term goals. And you can do this for much less than you can through pay per click advertising or managing a full-scale SEO campaign.

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Posted in Blogging for Small Business | No Comments »