My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘website advertising’

The Pay for Performance or P4P was originally invented by Overture. Overture observed that the internet was growing into a unique kind of shopping mall, where people could shop conveniently and easily and that advertising was gaining grounds on the internet. But now, Overture has been taken over by Yahoo and hence popularly known as Yahoo.

A visible and popular website attracts more and more people. It provides ads in other sites that link to a particular site can direct potential consumers and customers to that site thus increasing traffic and sales in that website. Yahoo provides a service using which it is possible to show ads kept in their websites when people input certain keywords.

Using Yahoo services, any willing website can have their traffic increased by utilizing the same. When more and more people become aware of your site, the traffic to your website would automatically increase. This in turn would increase the chance of people viewing your pages and products. Even if a small fraction of those people actually buy your products; that would still mean a substantial figure for you and your company.

It is the goal of every internet based company to get a high volume of potential consumers to their website. To accomplish this, the companies try a handful of methods to make their website more and more popular and make the people all over know about the existence of their services.

Yahoo/Overture is very similar to Google’s Adwords. Both of them use the same principle in showing ads according to keyword or keyword phrase searches. Whenever someone types in a phrase or a keyword in their search engine, the result page shows the usual results and along with it, shows the ads matching the search criteria on the right side of the same page. These ads in turn link to the websites of the respective companies.

As an example, let us consider that you run a car parts retail/wholesale site and you have chosen for Yahoo/Overture services, choosing some keywords that can trigger your ad to be displayed. Then, if somebody searches for Honda Accord, your ad might show up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. Using this system, you don’t even need to optimize your website with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

With some labor and work, you can make your site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search and you would have the chance of your site being displayed on the top of the list or at least, on the first page of a search result, thus increasing your chance of people clicking on your links. This is a fast way to have traffic and visitors to your website.

However, remember that this service is not free. There are different ways in which Yahoo/Overture might charge you. They could charge in the number of keywords or keyword phrases your as uses or in the number of times your ad gets clicked on. Similar services might offer other features like having your ad show up on some third party sites, besides showing it on the search result page. You should look out for those.

Some third party supports placing ads that have similar content to that of the site. The more sites your ads are shown, the more is the chance of getting visitors to your site, especially, if the site where your ad is shown is a popular website.

With the internet being the largest network and still growing and which has shrunken the whole world into a global village, with online businesses mushrooming, it is high time to start advertising and surge ahead in this rat race of getting visitors to your site. Yahoo/Overture is a great place to make a start. There are many who have used Yahoo/Overture and have had great success. It is a market strategy which will direct swarming traffic to your site and that in turn will boost your sales and result in profit.

Often it is seen that to make money, you require money. But by using services like Yahoo/Overture and other such types of low cost or free market strategies, it is often possible to get overwhelming results faster and on a big scale. Many of the online companies have learned this fact the hard way. Your company should, however, not be one of them.

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100).

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

It never ceases to amaze me how often new webmasters set about their online business at the start without actually having clearly defined strategies on how to market and promote the website and the product.

Now this article is for internet marketing newbies, so the strategies for website promotion are fairly basic therefore experienced internet marketers are under no compulsion to proceed.

If you are a newbie, however, please pay attention as these website promotional strategies are what you will need to employ over and over again every time you have a new product to promote. Apply these basic techniques and the bedrock of success is laid for you.

Remember, no traffic, no sales.

Free listings in Search Engines: Everyone loves to get something for free. The same applies to free traffic.

Consider building a keyword list related to your product before you build your website. This way, you write your website content crafting in those keywords for which the site needs to be optimised. Don’t overdo it though as the search engines are becoming too smart and may think you are attempting to trick them. The more pages you have, the easier it is to have your site optimised for your chosen keywords.

Pay Per Click Advertising: Here the search engines list your site based on your bid for a particular keyword(s). Your position in the search listing strongly depends on how much you are prepared to pay for those keywords and the bidding price is also dependent on the popularity and competitiveness of your niche. This Pay Per Click (PPC) listings are the ones you see on the right side of your screen in the search results in, for instance, Google and Yahoo who now own Overture.

It’s always a good idea to know your website statistics especially conversion rates to determine how much you will be prepared to pay for those keywords &ndash what I call your bid price affordability. This way you don’t operate your PPC Campaign at a loss.

Know Your Numbers!

Ezine Advertising: You search for popular ezines (these are electronic magazines or newsletters) in Google or Yahoo by entering Keywords ‘ezines directory’.

Visit these directories and look out for ezines that fit your products and also the subscription base of those ezines. You then choose to place Solo ads, Sponsor ads or Classified ads on ezines of your choice at an agreed price. The choice of which type of Ad and what ezine(s) to place your Ad would depend on your personal preference and your budget as well.

Linking Your Website: You need to set out linking strategies that can boost your business in two ways. First is that the more links you have, the more the search engines will rank your site and consequently your position in the organic search engines. Secondly, you get traffic deservedly from your link partners website. I’m sure you will welcome targeted free traffic from any source.

Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate program are a great source of free traffic and income at no cost to your good self. Affiliates are business partners who sign up to sell your product for an agreed commission. You can make a fortune on the internet from a great product if you have tons of affiliates working for themselves and you. An affiliate software is necessary to track your affiliate sales, visitors. Don’t forget to provide your affiliate with marketing tools and training materials to assist them.

Offline Advertising: This is quite often ignored. Just because your business is online does not mean you cannot generate traffic offline. You will be surprised at how potent this weapon can be. Write Press Releases about your product, Product review etc and send it to editors of newspapers and magazine. The one I love most is what we refer to as web ad. Here you use classified ads in newspapers and magazines to drive traffic to your site.

These are basic strategies you must have mapped out before commencing work on your website. This way you can start marketing the very day your website goes live.

Always think marketing first.