Summary: Are you a newbie looking for the lowdown on internet advertising? Armed with a small budget and a little time, here’s how to make your website go further online.
When most small businesses turn to the internet with a small budget and high hopes for their website, it can be a bit daunting – where do you start? There are so many kinds of internet advertising – should you buy banners? Should you buy links? What will get you the best results for the lowest possible cost? Read on to explore a selection of the different internet advertising options…
Pay per click (PPC)
PPC is one of the most widely used forms of internet advertising. Using PPC you bid on key words and phrases relevant to your website. Websites who have bid the most for a particular key word or phrase, appear in a special highlighted box at the top of the search engine (e.g. Google). You can set the amount you’re willing to pay for someone clicking on your link, and a daily budget. If nobody clicks you don’t pay. PPC offers good short term boost for targetted traffic. One of the most popular PPC schemes is Google Adwords – and Google provide a complete guide to setting up and using pay per click which you can download here.
There are two downsides to PPC. First, it’s very easy to spend a lot of money and get no results. That’s because there are loads of potential pitfalls in running a PPC campaign, from choosing the wrong keywords to writing an ad which will get you the wrong kind of visitors. Here at Angel, we offer affordable PPC management, which helps you get the absolute best value out of your campaign.
The other downside is that 10% or less of Google visitors click on PPC adverts so whilst it’ll bring you some traffic, it doesn’t have the potential of SEO. The best choice is to run a PPC campaign alongside your SEO campaign while you wait for SEO results – the PPC campaign, if managed properly, will bring you that extra revenue you need to fund your SEO.
Banners
You can buy banners on other peoples’ websites (perhaps with a similar topic to yours) but they’re a less popular kind of internet advertising due to the theory of ‘banner blindness’. This theory says we’re so inundated with banners that we just ignore them. It’s actually based on usability testing (Benway, J. P., Lane, D. M., Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss “Obvious” Links, 1998, Internet Technical Group, Rice University).
Affiliate schemes
You pay to be included in a directory of websites. Other people who have websites join the directory as an ‘affiliate’ and promote your website. You pay them a small fee for either visits to your site or sales. Affiliate Window is a popular choice for such schemes in the UK. It’s not cheap to join these types of schemes – expect to pay around £5,000 a year – but it works well for companies like Play.com and Boots, who only pay commission on confirmed sales.
Emails
Building an email list from visitors to your website is a great way to create a relationship with potential customers (we can help you add this feature to your website). By contrast, buying an email list from an email list broker can be riddled with difficulties. You need to be sure that the people on the list have truly ‘opted in’ to being contacted for marketing purposes and, let’s face it, how many people genuinely opt in to be contacted by a random company they’ve never heard of? Many lists are out of date or sold over and over to different people, reducing or diminishing their value. It’s far better to build up your own email list and send out quality emails with content of real value to your visitors.
Of course, getting past Hotmail, Gmail and other email spam filters is a difficult process. We can also assist with designing, building and sending out attractive emails to your opt in email list that are tested and confirmed to get through the spam filters – and we can track open rates and click through rates for you. We can also add tracking to your website to enable you to monitor exactly how many sales result from your email campaign.
Viral marketing
Viral marketing or advertising is a fresh and sexy way of getting your brand around, if it’s done properly. It makes use of viral content – videos, emails, stories, or other stuff people like to share. This is passed round from friend to friend, colleague to colleague, just like a virus. It sounds great but it’s easy to get wrong and viral campaigns that go wrong can backfire on the brand. Talk to us about a viral campaign for your brand.
Behavioural targeting
This form of internet advertising looks at displaying adverts and offers to the user based on their online habits. It can be marketing – this is something that can be rolled out on your website for more effective targetting. For example, a cosmetic site could quickly establish from a visitor’s behaviour if they are male or female and display appropriate offers and content on that basis. This is something Angel can set up for you.
Buying links, listings and reviews
Here’s a form of internet advertising you need to be careful about. Google’s webmaster guidelines do not allow you to buy any link or type of promotion that passes ‘link juice’. If you’re not familiar with this term, don’t worry – it just means that if you do pay for a link, listing or review, you need to ensure it is marked as ‘no follow’. If you’re not given this option, steer clear of making a purchase. Of course, paying to be considered for inclusion in a directory (like Yahoo) is not the same as buying a link – because you may not actually be included. When your site is looking good, paying the fee to be considered for inclusion in Yahoo is a good thing.