If you’re a small business owner, chances are you already have an advertising budget. While it may be a necessary evil, advertising doesn’t have to be a huge drain on your bank account. Unfortunately, many small business owners aren’t aware that there are cheaper and more effective alternatives to the traditional advertising mediums of radio, print and television. They simply use these advertising methods because that is what they’re familiar with. But if you’re serious about spending your advertising dollars wisely, then you need to harness the power of search engine marketing.
What Is Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of advertising for your website. By using a combination of contextual advertising, paid placement, paid inclusion and search engine optimization (SEO), your website will not only be highly visible in places like Google and Yahoo, but it will be visible to your target audience. Think about that statement for a moment. SEM ensures that your website is visible to your target audience. This is very different from traditional forms of advertising, which take more of a “shotgun” approach. When you place an ad in the newspaper, you’re paying to reach a large, untargeted audience. When you take out a radio or television ad, you’re doing the same thing. Sure, you might reach some of your target audience, but you’re also paying to reach a bunch of people that have no interest in your product or service. In other words, you’re throwing your advertising dollars away.
Other Benefits of Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a far more cost effective and efficient alternative to traditional forms of advertising. A well designed SEM campaign allows you to gain immediate traction in the search engines, which means that your business can quickly change gears and take advantage of current trends or changes in the market without waiting weeks or months for a more traditional ad campaign to be produced and published. Not only that, but search engine marketing campaigns have a much higher conversion rate because your advertising message is only delivered to people who are already looking for what you’re offering. In other words, these people already have money in hand; they just need to know where to spend it!
Bring in The Experts
Implementing a successful SEM campaign requires a very specific skillset, and while SEM is a very cost effective form of advertising, it’s very easy to throw your money away if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why you should hire an experienced SEO company to design and manage your Search Engine Marketing campaigns if you want to achieve the best results and get the most out of your advertising dollars.
Posts Tagged ‘ Ad Campaign ’
Wikipedia defines Search Engine Marketing as a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
I could go into the technicalities of SEM, algorithms, robots, etc. However, if you’re reading this article, you probably aren’t interested in me stuffing a bunch of technical terms down your throat. You would rather learn about search engine marketing and how it can bring you more business.
I chose this topic today based on a couple of conversations I recently had with new clients.
One of our clients had embarked on a small ad campaign with Yahoo before coming to us. He mentioned that when he was spending the money on Yahoo, the traffic to his site was much higher. When I asked how many sales he garnered from the advertising, he replied that he didn’t know. Website traffic and conversions to sales are two completely different things, with the latter obviously being more important. It’s crucial to keep track of your ROI (Return on Investment), if you are going to invest in online advertising. Make sure that you have the tools within your company-whether it’s your own database for tracking sales, or another form of tracking system-before you spend your first marketing dollar.
Another conversation I had with a client involved a Google Adwords campaign. He was bidding using every keyword under the sun. He had a huge CTR (Click Through Rate), but again, nobody was buying. At the end of the day, his budget was gone and he didn’t have anything to show for it besides lots of traffic and an empty bank account. Until I explained to him that he was paying for people to come to his site and quickly leave, he didn’t “get it”. Having the right keywords in your campaign and your ad copy, that are relevant to your product or service, will get you qualified click through to your site. You don’t want people to click on your ad, only to find that your site doesn’t offer the information they were looking for, and leave immediately. That will cost you wasted dollars each and every time they do that.
My advice to our clients is to, first and foremost, invest time on SEO. As long as you are engaging in honest practices, and not trying to fool the “Big 3″, the benefits will far outweigh the time you spend. If you can afford to hire a reputable firm, all the better! Please be aware that there are self-professed “SEO Experts”, who claim they can get you to the top of the SERPs, guaranteed. Any company representative who spews this line at you is most likely just out to take your money. Check them out thoroughly. Conduct an online search on their company, and don’t just stop at the first few pages of the results-dig deep to discover if they are reputable or not. Check with the Better Business Bureau or other consumer watchdog organization. Reputable firms won’t guarantee top placement, but they will give you realistic projections of how they can help you improve your placement results.
Until you really have all the pieces in place, it’s best not to engage in a pay per click campaign. Remember that it takes testing, monitoring and tweaking, as well as a significant amount of your time, before you will see any benefits.
I’ll start with my own experience:
A few years ago, the company I worked for ventured into a rather large PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign. We hired an expert, had all the tracking tools in place and launched a campaign to knock out our competition and drive traffic to our site; paying close attention to our sales funnel and expecting to convert our “browsers” into “buyers”. In addition to our PPC campaigns, we also hired a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm to help us with the natural results. Natural results are the result of traffic coming to your site outside of paid links directing it in. It should be noted that we had all the puzzle pieces in place and spent time on the following:
1. Analyzing the results from the analytics
2. A/B testing of different landing pages
3. Closely monitoring the PPC campaigns
4. Adjusting our ad copy and landing pages based on our conversion rate
We hired top firms for both the “paid” and “natural” campaigns, as well as an expert to oversee both of the campaigns. Without getting into the numbers here, (and believe me they were big), the end result was as follows:
1. We spent a large amount of money getting traffic to our website via the pay campaigns. The increased traffic did result in increased sales, however – the results made each sale a VERY expensive one, and not really worth the money that was spent on the marketing campaign. In short, our ROI (Return On Investment) was in bad shape.
2. We spent 80% less on the SEO campaign, which took longer, but garnered results that are still driving traffic to the website to this day.
In the end, we spent a ton of money getting traffic to our website which did not result in sales, and we learned several valuable lessons. In addition, we did suspect throughout our campaigns several instances of fraudulent PPC activity. Unethical companies will engage in this practice by hiring offshore companies at ridiculously low rates to click on their competitors’ ads. These companies use various IP addresses to avoid detection. The idea is to exhaust a competitor’s budget before legitimate click through and potential sales can occur. When we reported suspected PPC fraud, some clicks were refunded via ad credits (Yahoo!) and some could not be proven and were not refunded (Google). The best advice I have for companies on a small budget is to work on your natural search results via search engine optimization, and use various other forms of advertising, such as placing a print ad, and perhaps a nice banner ad (where you pay per month, not per click) on a relevant site. Later, when your marketing budget has grown, you can branch out into other forms of media, such as local radio or television.
I admit it…I’m a college geek. Well, at least I was about 30 years ago. And while I didn’t learn much in college that I use today as an Internet marketer, I did learn one thing in economics class that has helped me immensely with product creation and understanding market supply and demand. Now, if you think that doesn’t really matter when doing your marketing, think again. Supply and demand is the whole ball game when it comes to whether or not your product is going to sell and if so, for how much.
The basic law of supply and demand is simple. If the supply is high and the demand is low, then prices come down. If the supply is low and the demand is high, then the prices go up. Those of you who have had economics 101 know this. But exactly how does this apply to Internet marketing? I mean, if you’re selling info products, which aren’t a physical good, is there any real lack of supply? Well, there can be. How? Simple. Just tell your prospects that only a certain number will be sold and watch them head for the buy button if they think it’s something that will really help them.
You see it all the time with slick sales pages. Only 100 copies being sold, or this offer is only good for the next seven days. These are common tactics. Of course, if you want to have any kind of credibility, you better back up what you say. But that’s another message for another day. The point is, economic principals most definitely come into play when promoting anything online. So the more you understand about economics, the better your chances for success.
But economics is just the start. I also took marketing in college. Knowing the best ways to construct an ad campaign will greatly increase your sales conversion. I had a great marketing professor. This guy could sell anything to anybody. Heck, he sold me on taking the course in the first place when I went to talk to him prior to signing up.
Okay, there is a point to all of the above and here it is. By getting a solid education in marketing and economics, as well as writing and a number of other things, you will give yourself the best chance for having success with your Internet marketing career. A masters degree, which is what I like to call it, is the ticket to success, because unlike many college educations…knowing what you’re doing when it comes to your business is priceless.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
Creating products is great. It’s not a lot of hard work and with a decent ad campaign, you can make a killing. The problem is, especially in the “make money online” niche, products have a very limited life span and in order to keep being profitable, you have to keep creating them every few months or so. However, with membership sites, this isn’t the case. You can do the work one time and make a residual income for many months depending on how long you can retain your members. This article is going to explore this option in some detail, covering the basics.
A membership site is one where a person signs up for a service and each month they get access to that service. A great example of this in the IM niche is Aweber. This is an autoresponder service. Members have access to unlimited autoresponders where they can send out messages to the lists that they build. Personally, I have about 10 or so lists with Aweber and I can honestly say their service is top notch. I pay a monthly fee for this service and all they have to do is simply keep providing it. No monthly products to have to create to continue to build income.
Now don’t get me wrong…life is not all roses with membership sites. The manpower needed to run a site like Aweber is incredible. With all the members they have and all the emails that get sent on a daily basis, they have to have lots of server power behind an operation like this. Plus, with the problem with spam, they have to constantly keep on top of the spam lists to make sure they are not on them, otherwise their members’ emails don’t get delivered. So there can be a lot of work involved with a membership site.
Of course you don’t have to have an operation as massive as Aweber. There are many small membership sites on the Internet that make a nice residual income of $2,000 to $3,000 a month for very little work at all. You could set up a private membership to access online training tools. Once the tools are in place, the only thing you need to do is maybe add a few each month. This shouldn’t take much time at all.
There is a lot of money to be made with membership sites if you have the right model.
It’s certainly something to consider for your next Internet marketing project.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of web advertising and it is quite different from traditional form of advertising. The purpose of SEM is global while traditional advertising is meant to address needs of particular region or local clan of customers. SEM is designed to get the business or product ranked on the higher echelons in the right hand side of the search results through the Google AdWords campaigns, or YSM in yahoo. SEM is a paid campaign where ultimate aim of the advertiser is to rank on the top by paying highest bid amount. The text ads of the advertisers on the right hand side are the sponsored ads for which the Google charges per click basis.
Traditional advertising reaches to the masses through expensive electronic media. Moreover, creating the very ad campaign for traditional advertising is also quite expensive. It is this expensive nature of traditional media over the SEM that makes small and medium sized business entities fall directly for the cost effective SEM strategies.
Pull Based Advertising/ Push Based Advertising
SEM is a pull based advertising whereas the traditional advertising is push based advertising. It means that when you go for the online advertising, you have real prospective traffic visiting you. The prospective traffic is interested in buying your products and services, and you don’t have to shout to them to buy your products or services. However, in case of traditional advertising, this is not the scenario, as it is the advertiser who has to approach the customers located in the target market and shout for product/service.
Track of Potential Customers/Visitors
Again under the innovative and smart SEM method, the advertiser can easily keep the track of potent customers/visitors through the use of user-friendly and easy web analytics software like Google analytics, clicktracks etc. In this manner, the advertiser can know about real ROI of the money spent in the market. Based on the ROI, the advertiser can smartly optimize the campaign. However, in the traditional advertising method, this is simply not possible. There’s no actual and appropriate method where you can really calculate the total number of target customers that will fall your products or hire your services.
Effect on Sales and Profits
An advertiser through sem can reach to the maximum number of customers within a limited time frame, and this is simply not possible in case of traditional advertising. In case of traditional advertising, it might take even months before the real effect of advertising can be acknowledges. SEM provides long term sales and profits. Even if you have stopped SEM campaign, you can continue to achieve increased sales ever and ever after. However, in case of traditional advertising, the rise in sales and profits is only short term. The moment you have stopped advertising about your products or services, the sales and profits figure dips down.
Cost and Budgeting of Advertising
SEM is a fast track and cost effective form of advertising, whereas, traditional advertising is a slow process method and expensive form of advertising. Through the above comparison, one can easily reach to the conclusion, that if you really want to save money and reach globally in a fast way, then SEM is the only method to go with.