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INTRODUCTION
Today’s market place is very different than forty-years ago. Forty-years ago if you wanted to open a business you had to have upfront costs, property, large amounts of inventory, and your best bet for advertising was the local paper and direct mail pieces. Of course, this took a lot of effort and even more money. You had to hope and wait for people to get your ad and decide to come and purchase a product from you. Going out and getting them to come into your store would have been a difficult feat. Additionally, forty-years ago your ability of growth was limited to local purchasers for the most part. If what you had to offer was not in a reasonable distant from your potential consumers, your company suffered. Moreover, because most shopping was done near home, any bad publicity could really hurt your company’s reputation; thus, leading to your company being shut down.
Forty-years ago consumers had to find local places to purchase their goods at; everyday shopping was done within a modest radius from home-base. To know what merchant had new products or sales, one had to wait for either the Wednesday Flyer or the Sunday paper.
Options for product purchases barely existed beyond one’s living area.
Jump forward to the modern day and we know all of this has changed. Today, any individual can purchase whatever they desire from anywhere in the world. Most likely shipping will be free and the products returnable. There is nothing that cannot be found – the Internet has everything from the rarest of coffees to cheap rubber bracelets. It does not matter what is wanted, it is there for the purchase. And, that ability to purchase whatever it is wanted can be comparison shopped in the blink of an eye; thus an environment that is exceptional for the buyer and a tough one for merchants.
For business owners the Internet can be hit or miss. There are more customers than one can shake a stick at with an equal amount of competition. Unlike yester years when your nearest competition was a decent amount of distance away and your location added to your bottom for consumers appreciate convenience; the Internet has competition that is breathing down your neck. Competition on the Internet is so close to your proximity that it would seem your could just reach right through the Internet and touch them. They can take tease your customer away long before that customer ever knows you exist. In fact, all your competition has to do is rank better then you on any search engine results page.
Understanding the importance of your competitions proximity is one of the most important things to understand when dealing with marketing attempts on the Internet. Today, there is no distance between you and your competition and you most likely have anything that can not be bought on some other website. Now, when a consumer wants and needs a product or information, all they must do is put there desires into the URL and pages among pages of options displays on the search engine results page. What you must be concerned with in this situation, when listed amongst your competitors is stand out. In this book, you will learn about the main and most popular techniques to purchasing traffic to you website.
We will discuss pay-per-click methods that are one of the very most popular formats to use. This technique works nicely and if you create an excellent ad, you will gain enough traffic to push you to the next level of success. We will also discuss banner ads that were the first on the block for website marketing ads. They fell from popular use for awhile but in the last few years they have made their way back due to technological advances. These are inexpensive and if done write, valuable. To add to your arsenal of marketing weapons, we will also discuss email marketing and Search Engine Optimization. Email marketing is a great tool and excellent for targeted marketing attempts when you want to get up-close and personal with potential customers. Email marketing, if done well, will build your own client lists that will prove profitable.
Search Engine Optimization is the king of purchasing website traffic. Search Engine Optimization is not purchasing traffic in the tradi-tional means of the online market place. However, it is worth more than its weight in gold when done properly. Search Engine Optimiza-tion can bring in traffic like no other technique and those who under-stand its value can become the master of their search engine results page listing and rank. What is so pertinent to understanding this technique is that it can eventually lead to you not needing to pay for traffic from other mediums as all. Of course, you will continue to want to use other methods of paid website traffic, but you will be able to become much more selective in your efforts with more to spend on growth.
We will end this book with terms you need to know to start under-standing the web marketing industry. When first learning how to build your web site, it can be hard to gather your thoughts and wrap your mind around what is being said. To help in that, terms that are most often discussed in web traffic buying is listed. Not all of these terms are concepts mentioned throughout the book, but they are listed to add to your understanding. Read them as you would the rest of the book. They provide more than just definitions, there are helpful tips to be garnered.
PAY-PER-CLICK (PPC) ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS
What It Is? Advertising through the PPC method allows you as a business owner to place ads with keyword usage within search engine result pages, of course, for a price. The goal of PPC is to help website business owners attract targeted customers. Target customers are those that are already looking for your product offerings or the similar; this helps you by putting your ads and business in front of those who are most likely potential buyers. The goal of PPC methods of advertising is to provide you, the site owner, to control your budget while still gaining maximum site exposure.
Understand, you do not pay for the placement of your ad; instead, you pay once a potential customer clicks on your ad and goes onto your website. The amount you pay for that customer has already been agreed to through a bidding system. It is imperative to your site’s success to appreciate that you are paying each and every time your link is hit and your landing page is accessed – remember your budget!
When first starting out with your PPC campaign you must keep an eye on your budget and be prepared to spend a bit more during your first few weeks while you learn the system. Once you have your funds ready, it is time to determine your keywords. Make sure you properly research not only the best keywords or keyword phrases, but also the value of those words in terms of competition. Move onto creating your ad and creating an account and before you know it, you will have plenty of data to help you steer your efforts.
Often times, third-party companies allow for ads from search engines to be placed on their site; these are often referred to as a content network property. This is a benefit for all involved; especially considering it is not often in life you get a situation is win-win-win. See, the third-party gets a portion of the revenue paid by you the advertiser. In fact, they can earn upwards of eighty percent. Consider when you have searched for an item or information on the web and landed on a website full of information; remember the ads that are on the page? These ads usually have something in common and complementary with the item or information you sought.
It is not uncommon for consumers to ignore the ads on the content network and this place is not nearly as valued as listing high on the search engine results page. When your ads appear on a content network property, do not be concerned – your ad is still being seen! In fact, your ad is being displayed and seen along side similar or complementary information to your product. Now, there may not be a high click through rate, but these searchers will most likely resemble your target audience and therefore, resemble your customers.