Do you need to advertise your website?
Of course you do. If you don’t advertise your online presence, how are people going to find you?
The search engines will not find you for many weeks, months, or at all if you don’t advertise. And, even if you do get your business picked up by Google, Yahoo and other major search engines there are a whole list of reasons why your site is not showing up in the search results.
- Your website is new, or hasn’t been around long enough
- The site has not been developed to be search engine friendly. It has not been optimised.
- The webmaster has used some unethical coding in attempts to thwart the search results, and your site has been banned by the search engines. Yes, this does happen – a lot.
- The site is poorly marketed, if at all
- It is written to impress search engines and not people.
- Et cetera, et cetera
Why Advertise?
It makes little difference how great your services are, or how user-friendly the website is. If you don’t market your online business – nobody will know it’s there.
Successful marketing of an internet business is a lot more complicated that putting the address on the back of your car. It requires the identification of the right search engines and content related sites to place your advertisements on. We need to develop appropriate strategies tailor made for your niche of the market.
Advertising & Marketing Programmes:
A successful advertising and marketing programme will take advantage of multiple types of advertising; most common listed below. Where email advertising is also type which can be used, 67 Blue recommends caution in employing this type of advertising as your brand can quickly become labelled as SPAM and you will find yourself banned by search engines, variouos mail servers and effective kill your online presence.
- Search Engine Advertising & Marketing (SEAM):
SEAM is but one aspect of a successful marketing programme. Where it has the ability to generate some immediate inquries, leads and/or sales, it is often the most expensive form of online marketing. The minimum pricing on the Cost Per Click (CPC) is driven by advertiser demand to hold the #1 slot on the search results page. For example, the unqualified seach word of ‘battery’ cost a mere $0.05 per click in 2006, but today costs an average of $1.50 per click. In a highly competitive economy, with ever reducing profit margins, the costs associate with SEAM are becoming less and less viable. - Website Referrals:
Referral based targeted advertising programmes are those programmes where your ad-text or graphic banner is place on other peoples websites to drive targetted traffic. In this style programme it is the other person who wears most of the efforts in finding potential customers for you. The place your ad/graphic on their site hoping that one of the customers will not only click on your ad/graphic but follow through to purchase. Note: you have complete control over which websites are authorised to advertise for you.
* these can be setup based on a payment for each potential Sale referred (a.k.a. Lead); or
* for each actual Sale achieved; or
* through traditional CPC at varying rates (as low as 10c per click) - Information Services:
Info Services targetted advertising programmes are those programmes which utilise online versions of traditional infomation souces (whitepages, yellowpages, map services, etc) as opposed to general search engine scattergun approaches.
* Setup for Info Services is similar to that of search engine advertising & marketing.(SEAM)
* Costs assoctiate with CPC levels are lower, but then so is the potential number of viewers - Social Networks:
Social and Professional network marketing, like SEAM and InfoServ this type of online marketing can be setup using CPC advertising (by far the easiest and quickest way to drive interest to your pages, but also requires regular posting of relevant information onto your organisational “page” to attract interested parties. Social marketing is a stepping stone to your own website, where it hopes that the viewer will be intrigued enough to continue on to your site and make an inquiry.
Link Trading
Trading links can be just as equally bad for your domain as it can be good. Don’t be duped into thinking that the more traded links you have the better. You need to take into account who you are trading with and the quality of the sites that are linking into you.
3-Way links are even more dangerous. Often only working for one site and damaging the others. If Google finds out that you are 3-Way link trading, they will ban your site from their search results. You could also be banned for a number of other actions in which some unscrupulous webmasters try to fool the search engine spiders to believe that their site is better than others.