Continued from page 1
Once you get listed, you will start to receive targeted click thrus to your web site from people specifically searching for what you offer.
Pay Per Click Search Engines - If you are frustrated with other types of traditional advertising and you want a direct relationship between what you spend and
amount of advertising you get, you need to look into pay per click search engine advertising.
You can sometimes get traffic to your web site for as little as $0.10 per click. Once you try to advertise using pay per click search engines, you will find that many of best keywords will cost you much more than this (sometimes $1 to $5 or even more)! The key to this type of advertising is to do research to uncover low cost keywords so you can bid on them get traffic to your site.
Using this strategy, you should be able to use pay per click search engines to easily produce targeted clicks to your web site.
PR and Media - If you are looking for massive exposure at a very low cost, pr and media could be your ticket. A solid pr campaign could easily bring hundreds to thousands of targeted click thrus to your web site.
Getting your business in news can be a difficult task and you need to either hire a solid pr company that promotes from a marketing standpoint or you need to learn how to do some basic PR yourself. Hiring a PR company can be expensive, so it may pay to simply find an experienced freelance writer who will help you.
PR/media can be hit or miss and it can take some persistence to start getting stories published and to start driving traffic to your web site. But for amount of time and effort you spend doing PR, it can really pay off in long run in form of hundreds, thousands to even millions of dollars in free advertising.
EBay, Amazon and Other Large Sites - Large traffic sites that allow visitors to participate, open accounts and create profiles are great places to get free exposure for your web site. There is a lot of traffic generated by sites such as Amazon and Ebay which gives you opportunity to harvest some of it through creating user profiles and participating with their communities.
This is a simple, low cost way to generate traffic to your site since it does not really cost anything to setup accounts with these sites.
Banner Ads – Many people say banner advertising is dead, but it still continues to be a great source of Internet traffic for many web site owners. The best part about banner advertising is that prices have gone down significantly, so if you can create a banner that works, you can get a lot more quality exposure in comparison to other types of advertising.
The quality of your banner ad and your target audience will determine how many click thrus you get from your banner campaign, but many banner campaigns range anywhere from 1% click thrus to 8% click thrus, or sometimes as high as 20%. So if you are planning on doing any banner advertising, test a banner on a small level, and see how well it converts, and this will give you an indication of how well it converts on a larger level.
Affiliate Marketing/Joint Ventures – Affiliate markting and jv advertising are both similar in nature and. Most professional web marketers would say that it delivers highest quality click thrus available on web today. This is because these types of marketing are “endorsement” marketing where you have a particular person with certain credentials promoting your product. This personal referral often generates visitors who are hungry to see what you offer.
You can use this type of marketing by writing a letter to a potential partner who has a large customer base or by installing affiliate software on your web site and advertise for affiliate partners. Using an online affiliate program is very cost effective because you reach targeted visitors online and you only pay for leads or sales (usually a percentage of your sale or a set dollar amount).
Popunders/Guaranteed Visitors/Expired Domains - These traffic sources have been around for a while now and are all heavily promoted forms of advertising. But in comparison to other forms of advertising, it does not perform as well. Personally, I have experienced sending millions of visitors from this type of traffic with hardly recognizable results.
Most of this traffic is not very targeted because web site visitors did not get to site by choice. Instead, they were solicited from third party advertisers using popunders or tricky web pages, which does not make that person a qualified visitor to your web site. There are some networks of advertisers who can provide quality popunders at a reasonable price.
Click thrus are a way to measure quality of advertising because you can usually figure out how those clicks relate to your sales. That is why it is important to focus on how many click thrus you can produce when creating, marketing and advertising your web site. So next time you by any type of web advertising, try to get some indication of how many targeted click thrus you can expect to generate from that particular campaign, and you can get a good idea of how many sales you can generate.
Rod Davis is an Online Marketing Specialist who offers "The Small Business Survival Guide" and an informative newsletter called Microbusiness Marketing. Visit microbusinessmedia.com or call 303-440-8196 for more information..
