Driving Traffic And Advertising ...
An effective website is a great asset to your business and acts as a shopfront for you. For your website to be really effective at generating leads and business, people need to find this shopfront.
There are more than 8 billion web pages on the web and a further
20 pages added every second.
20 pages added every second.
The internet is a crowded marketplace that is constantly evolving ...
You cannot rely on prospects and random visitors to simply chance upon your website. You have to actively participate in driving traffic to your website.
The promotion of your website is important if you want to generate leads and new business …
There are a number of strategies that you can employ to get people to your website. Each is effective in its own way and a number, if not all, should be used simultaneously to maximise your results.
About Advertising ...
Advertising is one of the single most effective methods of driving traffic to your website. There are many forms of advertising at your disposal and some can be very expensive so you need to choose your method carefully. Always consider your Return On Investment (ROI).
About Banner Advertising ...
Banner advertisements are a fairly decent way of getting traffic to your website. You can place a banner on another person’s website and pay them a monthly subscription to place that advertisement for you.
- For example, Australian businesses looking to compete in a local market could look at advertising on any of the http://www.newscorp.com.au websites.
You may be given an indication of how many impressions your site will receive per month and it is not uncommon for some sites to offer 1 million impressions per month for very affordable rates.
There are two downsides to this method of advertising,
banner blindness and unqualified traffic.
banner blindness and unqualified traffic.
Banner blindness has been identified as something that most experienced web surfers have. It is believed some surfers have “tuned off or tuned out” to banner advertising because they know they are advertisements and just ignore them. In effect, the banner is not part of the page that is being viewed and is not considered an element worth clicking on.
For a minimal investment though, it’s probably
worth a try at least once!
worth a try at least once!
Websites that offer thousands of hits often have a lot of unqualified traffic. The cost per click may be low but the number of people likely to purchase from you is even lower. As an example, if you are a financial planner, it may cost $50 per month to advertise on a site promising 100,000 clicks but it may be $10 per month advertising on an accountant’s website offering 500 clicks that offers more conversions. Those 500 clicks are worth more to you as they are targeted properly. Always consider your (ROI) return on investment when considering banner advertising.
About Pay Per Click Advertising ...
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising allows you to artificially place yourself at the top of search engines by sponsoring search terms. It is every website owners dream that they are in the number one position with search engines for specific keywords but the reality is there are millions of people competing for the same spot.
By sponsoring keywords you automatically raise
yourself to the first pages of results.
yourself to the first pages of results.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is an effective method at driving traffic to your website. Most PPC advertisers, like Google Adwords and Overture, do not charge you for listing an ad. You only pay when your ad is clicked on.
Most PPC advertising providers allow you to set daily budgets on your campaigns so that once your budget is reached, the ad is withdrawn until the following day. This way there are no cost blow-outs.
PPC offers you an opportunity to do some very targeted, low-cost advertising and you just can’t beat it for flexibility and control mechanisms.
Some search terms can be very expensive to advertise under when you look for advertising space on Google and Yahoo. These two search engines are the two most popular and account for 75% of all searches made on the Internet. People often forget that there are many other search engines (the other 25%) offer PPC advertising and aren't as saturated as Google and Yahoo.
There are a host of smaller search engines that have little or no adverts even though they offer this option and they still have 1 billion searches+ per month. These engines are not as well known as Google but are still in use.
About Text Advertising ...
Most traffic to a site is driven by a search engine. If you find that you are not on the first page of Google on the search terms you think your potential clients will search under then visit all the websites that do appear on the first page and enquire into advertising rates.
You can ask to have a small text ad placed on their home page for a fee. This will give you a good chance of harvesting leads from websites offering qualified traffic and achieve a valuable link from a highly rated website back to your website. This promotes your website in the short-term and in the longer term will lead to an increased search engine ranking.
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