The most success I have had with advertising has been through pay per click. I tried the free
advertising route in the beginning and gained very little traffic for my effort. I have a budget of 5
dollars a day for pay per click divided between two companies Miva and Marchex-Adhere. I receive
about 40 to 60 clicks per day. I receive about ten to fifteen hits per day on individual advertisers
inside my website.
Pay per click works by producing an ad usually with a title and caption then choosing relevant
keywords. Relevant key words are words that people would type in to reach your site. These
keywords are bid on and the amount of the bid places a person on a certain page in the search
engines used by that company. The higher the bid price, the higher up the search ranks. The higher
up the search engines used the higher the price goes for clicks. Google Adwords is at the top for
price per click. Find a company that uses search engines relevant to your company. When a person
arrives on a search engine page where your link is they need to know the, who, what, and where in a
short, to the point and captivating way. This is where an ad comes into play. Many pay per click
companies allow only short titles and descriptions, so being creative is a must. The title is a short
description of who you are; usually, up to 50 characters are allowed. The caption tells the viewer what
the link is about. What will the viewer find if she chooses to click on your link? Usually, up to 500
characters are allowed for captions. The domain name at the bottom tells people where they are.
Many of these pay per click companies allow a person to run more than one ad or edit the existing
one so a person can try different ads. There are two big advantages to using pay per click
advertising: first, most pay per click companies look after all the statistics concerning your ads and
key words, which helps in refining your ads and keywords to maximize their effectiveness. Second of
all, search engines work on the system of links with more hits are put higher up the search engine
results and many pay per click companies will reduce the price per click for those companies that are
generating more traffic.
How else can I increase my search engine rankings? Is there viable free advertising avenues? The
three biggest free advertising avenues are emailers, classifieds, and manual submission of ads into
search engines and directories. Emailers are okay to use if you are promoting one product . The
biggest disadvantage to using free emailers is that it is agreed upon at the beginning that a person
will receive emails back from members using that company. In other words many ads will fill up a
chosen email address. I found Gmail to be the best for holding and deleting junk emails. To me emails
are nothing more than picking flyers out of your home mail box. I personally do not use emailers any
more because of the time I spend clearing out my email box, which could be spent refining my site or
using the other three marketing avenues.
Free ads and classifieds do work for generating low to moderate traffic. I have found only a few
classified ad companies that are worth using, which are listed on the fourth floor. Running a free
classified works on the same principles used in pay per click advertising. The advantages to using
free classified sites is they usually allow more characters for the caption, and many offer your own
home page where a person can build a personal and business profile. They offer a variety of tools to
build free home pages and offer paid options to help with the effectiveness of the ads and home
page. Like pay per click, a person is able to edit the ads and keywords to make the ad more effective.
The disadvantage is the number of search engines the ad is run in and the placement of the ad is
usually on the back pages. In addition, the free ad is usually allowed to run for a short period and
must be manually reset. There are usually a limited number of statistics available on the individual
components of the free ad. Expect to receive about 0 to 10 hits a day from a free classified.
The last free advertising avenue I use is manually submitting to search engines and directories. Keep
in mind that the goal of moving up the search engine ranks will increase the number of advertising
avenues. What I mean is that the more traffic to your site, the more people want to link to your site,
the more directories and search engines want the traffic linking to your site with the added bonus of
these companies eventually pursuing your site and offering cost effective advertising options. Is
manually submitting a free ad a waste of time. This is a yes and no answer: it depends on site quality,
userfreindliness, product availability and demand. In other words if a person has an aesthetically
pleasing site that viewers find easy to use, carries a product wanted by many, and the product is hard
to find manual submission will be more effective. The other point to keep in mind is that each search
engines and directories have editors who view the submitted ads and decide whether to accept or
reject each link submission. Some of their criteria are the aesthetics, the products and has the person
chosen the right category for his ad to be placed in. All these things will go along way in having a link
listed. Another fact to keep in mind is that directories with large link submissions give priority to paying
customers. The wait time for approval can be up to 2 months or rejected altogether. The number of
search engines and directories allowing free submits are in the thousands. I, personally submitted to
well over 500 directories, out of these I have compiled a list of those directories that approved within
two weeks. I will be refining this list as new information arrives. My goal is to help you save time by
starting with directories and search engines that approve ads quickly. Another alternative to free link
submissions is carrying a reciprocal link and placing it on your site. This will give more priority in being
accepted. This area I will be refining my lists to include the directories that approved quickly for
carrying a reciprocal link. The last step discussed in step two is a site's meta tags- A site description
tool used and seen by programmers, editors and others. The meta tags are not seen on the site. It is
good to spend some time coming up with a complete site overview with as many key words as possible
that relate to your site. Appropriate meta tags help editors and web crawlers find the most effective
place for your link in search engines. Meta tags are hard to edit. The first part of the meta tags is
seen in search engines when viewers type in a domain name, so watch for spelling errors. Find out
what the web building software has for this important option.
The material found here is an overview of how build, publish and advertise and keep some of the
costs down. There are many paid options for each component of Internet marketing. My final advice is
to have fun, set reasonable goals, and be willing to change them if something is not working.
Concentrate on building and advertising your website even though there are a great number of
distractions that will pull you away from this. Think of it this way; I am inviting all these viewers to my
address, so I should make sure my place is tidy, appealing, inviting and easy to find.
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