There are three primary types of online
advertising:
1) Banner Ads
2) Email / Newsletter Marketing
3) Partners and Affiliates
4) Taking Advantage of Search Engines
Banner Ads
This kind of advertising is very similar to conventional advertising
in its approach, it just happens online. You pay for placement
of your banner ad on a page of someone else’s web site.
This too can be expensive, may not qualify your visitors as
much as you would like, and the promised results can be misleading
if you are not careful.
Depending on the site you are considering advertising on,
they could potentially mislead you by telling something like
“Your ad will get 70,000 page views per month”.
The page your ad is placed on may get 70,000 page views per
month, but if they put you at the bottom of the page, your
ad will not get that many page views. Not at all. You could
end up paying $1300 for these “page views” and
only get a single visitor a day from this ad. I know because
this is exactly what happened to me once.
It would be a good idea to get a promise of a certain number
of banner clicks as opposed to page views or “impressions”
if you are considering this kind of advertising. Don’t
get fooled or confused by words such as “page views”,
“impressions”, “hits”, or “visitors”.
These words do NOT mean the same thing. 70,000 impressions
is meaningless, while 70,000 visitors is tremendous! Keep
that in mind.
Email / Newsletter Marketing
Email and Newsletter marketing are both very powerful methods
of marketing to your customers, but they are much more effective
as a follow-up tool after your business is already established.
The great thing about marketing by email is that it is fast,
cheap, efficient, and your customers are highly qualified.
Email campaigns are a tremendous way to get repeat business,
but they are not very effective at getting new business…
that is unless you combine them with a referral program of
some kind.
Why aren’t email and newsletter marketing good for
drumming up new business? Well, because you have to have customer
email addresses to send your email or newsletter to, and unless
you have customers who have given you their email addresses
to receive such marketing from, you have no one to send your
marketing to. That is unless you purchase an email list from
someone else, and I don’t recommend you do this. This
would be considered spam, and you don’t want to do anything
unethical like that.
When you do set up your email marketing campaign, make sure
you allow your customer the opportunity to both opt in and
opt out of the mailing. You really don’t want to use
their email without their permission to send them marketing
emails, even if they have done business with you before. This
would also be considered spamming. The only exception to this
rule would be when you are sending out your very first email
campaign. Then you could ethically use all of the emails you
have to send your campaign to. Just make it possible for them
to opt out easily if they do not wish to receive emails from
you in the future.
Partners and Affiliates
Partners and affiliates are another popular way to generate
web site traffic and business. This is the online version
of networking. Partnering up with a webmaster or online business
owner with a related web site, product or service can be a
great way to get more traffic to your site resulting in more
sales. It can be mutually beneficial to both sites making
it appealing to both parties. Partnering up with another web
site can be as simple as exchanging links with each other
(he puts a link to your site on his web site, and vise versa)
An affiliate program is a bit more specific. This too is
an online partnership, but what it is specifically is a paid
partnership. You would set up an affiliate program (more on
this later), and your affiliates would promote your site/product/service
for you for a commission. They would get a pre-determined
percentage of the sale of your product. You as a online business
owner can make money from this in two ways. The first is by
getting more sales of your own products from people referring
more traffic to you for a commission. The second is by taking
a commission yourself for referring your visitors to another
product for which you have become an affiliate! By doing this,
you are not only making more money directly, but you are also
adding to the quality of your web site by recommending quality
products that compliment your own!
Taking advantage of search engines: search
engine positioning!
This method of marketing is so powerful and so effective (especially
for the small or home-based online business) that I devoted
an entire section of my book, "How Ordinary People Make
Extraordinary Money Online!" to this marketing approach
alone. If any information in my book were more unique and
more beneficial than the rest, this would have to be it. For
some strange reason, this method of online marketing is so
neglected, avoided, misunderstood and disregarded and I have
absolutely no idea why. It is not difficult, it is so inexpensive
(I would go as far as to call it downright cheap!), and the
results are amazing. While it does take a little time to learn,
you can potentially begin to see results in as little as a
few weeks!
I am completely baffled as to why so many of the web designers
I talk to are completely uninformed about search engine positioning.
Even worse, they seem completely uninterested in the subject.
You would think that after having just created a gorgeous
website that they would want to figure out a way to show it
off to as many people as they could. This amazingly does not
seem to be the case. The good news for you is that you now
have information that will give you a HUGE advantage over
all of these guys! They have no idea what they are missing
out on!
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