Marketing strategies

There are several strategies to market your website online. Obviously, one may mention search engine submission. It is true that search engine submission is a popular way to obtain web traffic, you may not need to do any submission these days. Google, the top search engine, will automatically pick up your website even when you don’t submit to it. The most important thing to do is to make sure that the site has good content and had a lot of links going in and out of it.

Banner ads are also another way to advertise your site but it lacks interactivity. It looks very impersonal so it is losing its value as an effective means of online advertising. Nevertheless, it helps to publicize your products.

Aside search engine submission and banners, another strategy is to buy ad spaces in newsletters. Newsletters are web-based magazines to which people subscribe. There are several places to place ads including:

Every trade has its tricks. People who read e-zines don’t have the time to spend all their day on ads. So you got to keep your messages short and impressive. Try to capture the attention of the reader in the first few seconds before a flash pop up attracts his attention on the screen. Apply commanding headlines and immediately tell the reader what you are selling and how it will benefit them. It is discouraging to mention technical details and size of the products here. Keep these aspects down the page.

Another strategy is to exchange links with other sites. Link exchange is the process of placing reciprocal links on eachother’s websites. Link exchange brings passive publicity to your website and helps your site to be popular. Google had made it clear that for your website to be ranked on their search engines, you will have to be popular. You may also read what Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google wrote at http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html.

You can also market your products by creating a signature for your emails. A signature is a sentence found at the foot of outgoing email. The signature can advertise your products or give the reader some more information about your business. You can set up a signature in a web-based email like Yahoo easily. Simply go to mail “options” and then click “signature”. The procedure is similar and available for all types of emails including outlook.

Participating in internet forums, newsgroups, or web communities can bring a lot of traffic to your business. You only have to find the right group that caters to your product interests and subscribe to it. Although direct advertising at these groups may not be allowed, you will find a lot of people asking for advice or help on these platforms and you can take a huge advantage of that. The biggest groups on the net can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com and http://groups.msn.com.

Paid and free online marketing

When do you go in for paid advertising and when do you go in for free advertising.? It all depends on the rate of return. If you are beginning your web business, it may help to go in for free adverts and then as you generate revenue you opt for paid ones. The reason is, a new business needs cash to grow and at this stage heavy investment without predictable response can hurt the business.

Google adwords and PPC

Google adwords is an online advertising program in which advertisers pay when web surfers click on their links. Actually adwords is a branded form of PPC (Pay Per Click). PPC online advertising is a type of online advertising in which you only pay for results. That means, online advertisers only pay when a web searcher actually clicks on a link and visits their Web site. PPC advertising is different from traditional online advertising. Online adverts pay according to how many times their ad is displayed. With Pay Per Click advertising, an online advertiser pays only when a web searcher actually clicks on the ad.

PPC is a cost effective way to advertise online as you only pay for actual clicks to your website and not mere display of adverts. It is an affordable way to draw highly targeted traffic to your website.

Strategies with Google adwords and PPC

To get the best value for your money, do not bid on exhausted keywords such as computers. You can gain a slight edge over your competitors by adding a smart adjective like “home computers” . To be sure about which keyword to use, you can go to http://inventory.overture,com or https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox. Here , type the keyword you want to use for your PPC and see how many people are already searching for that item. Let’s take an example. Assuming you go to overture and 10 million people are searching for the word “home computers”. The next thing to do is to go to Google and type the same keyword with quotation marks and see how many websites will come up. If you have 5 million websites as the returned results, then you have 50 percent chance of making sales, all things being equal. To get commercially-oriented websites out of the search result, you can add the word “sell” or “sale” to narrow down the returned results.

Google Ads