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Articles Index >> Marketing
Online Advertising Can Be Cheap and Effective
by Michael Cheney
Despite all the many ways that you can get people to find you on the Internet
for free, advertising is still a great method of promoting your website. It’s
often forgotten in all the talk about search engine optimization, website marketing,
key phrases, link building, etc. that one of the best ways to get people to
your site is to actually advertise online.
With online advertising there are lots and lots of low cost options available.
You don’t need to have a budget of thousands, or even hundreds, to be
able to advertise online and get people coming straight to your website.
One of the great benefits about advertising online is that it comes with instant
results. You can start a Pay Per Click campaign, for example, and minutes later
you can be getting clicks and visitors and leads through to your website.
Advertising your website on the Internet gives you the ability to have ultimate
tracking and testing. If you place an ad in a newspaper you can’t, for
example, see how many people have read the ad or see where they were looking
before they saw the ad. But when you’re advertising on the Internet, for
example with Google Adwords or with Overture, you can actually track where people
have come from, which phrases they have typed in, which search engine they visited
you from, which page they landed on, how they actually behave when they read
the ad, which ad performs better than another ad and so on.
With online advertising you can start small and adopt what they call the Kai-Zen
approach. This means starting small and making small but continual improvements.
You do this with your online advertising efforts by constantly testing.
If, for example, you’re running an ad on Adwords for a particular phrase,
you would have two versions of the ad with slightly different headlines. You
would run that until you get, say, 30 clicks on one of the ads. This ad would
be the best performing ad and would become the new test model. You then run
that ad against a new ad with a slightly different headline again. If one of
the ads gets 30 clicks again you know that it would become the new test model
and so on.
You can make small changes like this to your online advertising campaigns and
actually improve them dramatically over time. You can change things like the
URL; you could buy domain names very cheaply and test different domain names.
You can test the headline, the words that are used, the descriptions; you can
even test the price.
What you can do is flip-flop the descriptions. You might have a two-line description;
you could put line one first one time or second another time and see what effect
it has on the click through rate and the conversion rate.
The main thing you need to bear in mind when doing online advertising is that
you need to track everything. Get yourself a system that enables you to actually
see how every single ad is working; how many people are clicking on it and how
many people are actually buying as a result of clicking on that ad.
The other thing about online advertising is that you’ll reach visitors
that non-advertising websites would never reach. You are reaching out to other
parts of the Internet that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to with non-paid
routes.
So all the best with your online advertising efforts.
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