A Frugal Internet Marketing Strategy That Works!
So you finally created the website that your business or brand needs to market globally, but nobody is clicking on your site and the phone never rings. It seems that you have immediately become fodder for those other marketers to sell you their manuals about web marketing, but you might as well have spent your website development money on a gym membership. Quite simply, there are millions of websites on the Internet, and only a few can have top positions in a search engine. If your company is "top dog" in a significant search engine for the right key words, then your company has arrived. A first page listing in Google or Yahoo on popular words integral to your site should help you bring home the bacon. For about $4000 upfront, companies like Morevisibility.com and SubmitExpress.com will help move your site up in search engine ranking, if you also invest in pay-per-click advertising. Some good ones to try are the pay-per-click venues that Google and Yahoo or a hosting company like Interland runs. There you can choose some keywords that are ultra-relevant to your site and bid on how much you are willing to pay per click to determine how high up on the sponsor list of links you appear on the right side of well-trafficked pages. Of course, how often is also determined by how much monthly money you can commit to this marketing approach. A still less expensive and very effective way to tell people about your company website is to use a feature writing service that will write and distribute a feature about a topic which is of interest to people. Within this feature, they will subtly couch a PR mention about your company and your web address. These popular features get distributed to newspapers nationwide ? both online and print --and Internet editors at e-zines, newsletters, article directories and search engines. They usually get printed as written, unlike the ordinary press release which often winds up in the garbage. If you try a newer service like Points of Persuasion Syndicate (P-O-P-S), you will get maximum service, real PR agency savvy and enthusiasm at a price point you cannot beat. When you click on http://www.p-o-p-s.com/info.asp, you can read about the service offered to clients. Then you can hit the Home page at www.p-o-p-s.com and click on the Available Columns link to see some of the features that editors can download for a year or so. P-O-P-S guarantees their features will be downloaded by at least 25 editors in six months, or you get a free second feature. A company spokesperson assures us that the usage has always been much greater than that. Myrna Greenhut is currently president of P-O-P-S, a service designed to supply incremental newspaper and Internet PR impressions for companies-large and small, Associations and PR agencies. As a consumer product publicist, she has been with numerous independent and advertising affiliated PR agencies like The Rowland Company, Ogilvy & Mather, Cairns & Associates, D-A-Y as well as having done major freelance PR projects for Avon Products Incorporated.
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Banner advertising can dramatically help you increase traffic to your web site. Banner advertising can be a very cost effective marketing solution and can help you to gain access to millions of internet users. It can also prove to be a huge waste of time, even creating a net loss rather than increasing your bottom line. So we'll try to guide you onto the path to true results and a very successful Internet Marketing campaign using banner ads.
First things first: What's it going to cost you? Assuming you're going to design and building your own banners, you can still loose money on the cost of advertising if you're not careful. Work out the estimated cost of each banner advertising campaign:
Cost-per-Visitor: If you pay $10 per thousand impressions ($10/CPM), and you get a 2.0% click-through (20 visitors), your cost-per-visitor is $.50 ($10 per 20 visitors).
Cost-per-Sale: Now you know about what you're going to pay per visitor. So what does that amount to per sale? Well, if 1 in every 20 visitors buys your product, your cost per sale is $10.00.
Total Sale Amount : $9.95 USD Paypal's Fee Amount : -$0.59 USD Net Profit Amount : $9.36 USD
So if each sale of your product produces a gross profit of $9.36, then your net profit per-sale will be -$.64 ($9.36 gross profit - $10 cost-per-sale). This campaign is not profitable!
As you can see, something has to change in order to make a profit. That's why it's important to track and calculate every campaign. So what went wrong with this example?
-Paying too much for the banner space?
-Need a better click-through rate?
-Need to charge more for your product?
The truth is that only you have the information required to decide but at least at this point you're in a better position to make a qualified decision.
Return on Investment Ratios: Your return-on-investment (ROI), before non-marketing expenses, is 0.0% ($0.00 total net profits with a $10 investment).
Experiment by advertising on multiple sites or using different banners if your budget will allow it. Find the perfect campaigns that yield the highest ROI.
A few terms to know:
» CPM - Cost Per Impressions (The "M" comes from the Roman numeral for 1,000). So $20 CPM represents $20 per 1,000 displays of a banner). An Impressions is simply each time your banner is shown.
» CPC - Cost Per Click. You pay an agreed amount for each click-through to your site.
» Click-Through (CT) - A click on an ad which takes the viewer to another site.
» Click-Through Rate (CTR) - This is the number of people who click on an ad (banner or text link) divided by the number of displays of the ad, represented in percentages. Example: 500 people click on an ad that has been shown 10,000 times, which works out at: 500/10,000 X 100% = 5%.
» Run Of Site (ROS) - This means your banner will be displayed on all or most pages of the site.
Buying or Creating your own banners: You can find a graphic designer to create your banner or you can simply learn to design and build you own. We have done both on this site and our research shows almost equal results when using identical conditions. We're not going to give tutorials on banner design but we will offer a few tips to help get you started.
If you decide to purchase your banners: Do your research. There are many so called ' graphic designers' that have very little training or experience with any type of graphics much less internet marketing or banner advertising.
Get any promises or guarantees in writing. Keep in mind that anyone can setup shop online and many have no idea what they're doing to say the least.
Do it yourself banners: There are several options when it comes to creating your own banners. Again, we're not here to teach you how to design and build your own, just to guide you in the right direction.
Here are a few things to consider:
» Think through your design.
» Decide on a format.
» Flash or Animated.
» Image or HTML.
» The best banner size.
» Image load times.
Image or HTML? Well, most of the banners we see are image based, whether .gif, .jpg of flash. But there is another very simple alternative. The HTML banner. You can even combine images and HTML to create incredible banners. A couple benefits of using a HTML banner are:
» HTML banner will normally load faster.
» On a HTML banner, you can promote many links.
Banners sizes:
468 x 60.....Full banner
234 x 60.....Half banner
392 x 72.....Full banner with vertical navigation bar
120 x 240...Vertical banner
125 x 125...Square button
120 x 90.....Button #1
120 x 60.....Button #2
88 x 31.......Micro button
A few tips:
Use attractive and attention grabbing images. Keep your text short and simple.
Use proven key words like "free" and "now". "Free" is a very powerful incentive for the viewer to click on the button. Even the words "Click Here" can increase your click-through rate. Use a large font size for your message text. Create different versions of the banner. Test different banners to improve your click-through rate.
Animate your banner, but use as few frames as possible to keep the file size to a quick loading minimum. Test new banners with a Pay Per Click network, before you use them in Pay Per Impression campaigns. Many sites display two different banners on each page, while others display the same banner at the top "top fold" and bottom "bottom fold" of each page. When given a choice, it's usually best to choose the top fold of page because the viewer is more likely to see your banner. You can expect to pay a lot less for "bottom fold" of page banner spaces.
Brian Hawkins - Entrepreneur, Internet Marketer, Online business consultant, Author. Site owner and administrator of several sites including: http://www.extremesitepromotions.com/ and http://www.csc4u.com/
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