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Web Advertsing: Its All About the Click Thrus!
Copyright 2005 Rod Davis
Working in research and development for a large infomercial
company, I had many opportunities to do large advertising
campaigns with lots of different online advertising
agencies and Internet marketing companies. I would
literally go online for days researching companies and the
types of advertising they offered to find just the right
ones to meet the needs of our company.
We spent thousands of dollars before we were able to come
up with accurate measures of which campaigns were actually
converting prospects into customers. But after much
testing, I came to an interesting conclusion about online
advertising.
Many advertisers have a large emphasis on the amount of
exposure you get to your web site, but after running many
expensive campaigns, I have learned that this is not what
matters at all. The things that matters most in web
marketing usually boil down to how many qualified, targeted
click thrus you can generate to your site.
Click thrus are the main thing you need to focus on when
creating an advertising campaign. For our company, it has
been the most accurate measure of the quality of any type
of advertising we bought, whether it was banner ads, email
campaigns, popunders, search engine, pay per click or any
other type of advertising you do on the web.
Click thrus represent an Internet user who has been
motivated to visit your site by clicking on an email or
online advertisement of any type. It is the highest quality
traffic you can have coming to your site.
Once you get this type of high quality traffic to your
site, you can then focus on trying to convert your visitors
to customers and sales. If you have a tracking method or
software, you can then determine your conversion ratio. The
conversion ration will tell you how many visitors you will
need to get to your site to convert a sale.
If you can figure out how many click thrus it takes to make
a sale and you know now much it cost to get clicks to your
web site, you can then use that information to predict the
results of some of your advertising campaigns. Armed with
this information, you will then have a lot more confidence
when spending money or time on any type of online
advertising.
If you are looking to generate high quality click thru's to
your web site, you will find that this is not the easiest
thing to do. You will find many types of online advertising
and lots of companies making outrageous claims on how much
exposure you get. But when it comes down to it, exposure
means nothing if you dont generate click thrus to your web
site. If you want to generate true targeted traffic to your
web site, you should definitely take a good look at these
types of advertising.
Email Marketing - Email marketing is probably the most
direct way to generate click thrus to your web site. You
can either hire a third party company to mail to their
lists or you can build a list of your own.
Email is great because you can instantly reach large
numbers of interested prospect and start to generate click
thru's within hours of sending your message out.
This method of marketing does have its drawbacks. It is
getting more and more difficult to send email, because of
SPAM regulations and extensive filtering by ISP's.
Fortunately, many marketing tools are coming out to help
the average person start and maintain a list without
knowing a lot of technical knowledge.
The best way to use email marketing is to build an opt-in
list of prospects that you can mail to over and over again.
Using a third party list or company to email will cost you
a fortune if you do it over and over without building a
list of your own. This is why it is important to
concentrate on building your opt in list. Many of the
people who opt in to your list will eventually become your
customers if you have a solution to their problem.
Coregistration - This is powerful list building method many
Internet marketers have been using for about 3 years now.
Coregistration advertising is the process of generating
opt-in email leads to add to your mailing list or
autoresponder for marketing purposes. Using this form of
advertising, you can build a large list of qualified
prospects in little time.
The quality of coregistration leads can vary from company
to company so it really pays to understand how they are
generated and how old the leads are. The best types of
leads to buy are called Opt-In coregistrations where
individuals have specifically responded to your ad for more
information.
You can also get other type of leads that are cheaper, but
they are not as high quality as the leads generated
specifically for your business. In addition, these cheaper
leads are harder to deal with when mailing your messages.
Once you have these leads in your email system, they become
a source of targeted click thrus every time you mail out to
your lists. In addition, you are basically getting free
advertising once you have your own list. Coregistration
helps you get to that point quickly if you use it correctly
and if you find some solid lead sources.
Search Engines - Search engines have long been a source of
rich, targeted traffic, but competition and strict search
engine rules make it difficult to simply put up a web site
and take advantage of this type of traffic.
You could hire a search engine optimization company (often
called SEOs) to help you get your site placed, but this
usually costs a minimum of $1000 up to $5000 or more and a
significant amount of time to get results. Most web site
owners would be better off applying basic search engine
optimization techniques themselves and saving their money.
These techniques can include gaining link partners,
frequently adding fresh content, and utilizing relevant
keywords. The results of these efforts can be just as
rewarding as using an SEO company in many cases.
Once you get listed, you will start to receive targeted
click thrus to your web site from people specifically
searching for what you offer.
Pay Per Click Search Engines - If you are frustrated with
other types of traditional advertising and you want a
direct relationship between what you spend and the amount
of advertising you get, you need to look into pay per click
search engine advertising.
You can sometimes get traffic to your web site for as
little as $0.10 per click. Once you try to advertise using
pay per click search engines, you will find that many of
the best keywords will cost you much more than this
(sometimes $1 to $5 or even more)! The key to this type of
advertising is to do research to uncover low cost keywords
so you can bid on them get traffic to your site.
Using this strategy, you should be able to use pay per
click search engines to easily produce targeted clicks to
your web site.
PR and Media - If you are looking for massive exposure at a
very low cost, pr and media could be your ticket. A solid
pr campaign could easily bring hundreds to thousands of
targeted click thrus to your web site.
Getting your business in the news can be a difficult task
and you need to either hire a solid pr company that
promotes from a marketing standpoint or you need to learn
how to do some basic PR yourself. Hiring a PR company can
be expensive, so it may pay to simply find an experienced
freelance writer who will help you.
PR/media can be hit or miss and it can take some
persistence to start getting stories published and to start
driving traffic to your web site. But for the amount of
time and effort you spend doing PR, it can really pay off
in the long run in the form of hundreds, thousands to even
millions of dollars in free advertising.
EBay, Amazon and Other Large Sites - Large traffic sites
that allow visitors to participate, open accounts and
create profiles are great places to get free exposure for
your web site. There is a lot of traffic generated by sites
such as Amazon and Ebay which gives you the opportunity to
harvest some of it through creating user profiles and
participating with their communities.
This is a simple, low cost way to generate traffic to your
site since it does not really cost anything to setup
accounts with these sites.
Banner Ads Many people say banner advertising is dead,
but it still continues to be a great source of Internet
traffic for many web site owners. The best part about
banner advertising is that the prices have gone down
significantly, so if you can create a banner that works,
you can get a lot more quality exposure in comparison to
other types of advertising.
The quality of your banner ad and your target audience will
determine how many click thrus you get from your banner
campaign, but many banner campaigns range anywhere from 1%
click thrus to 8% click thrus, or sometimes as high as 20%.
So if you are planning on doing any banner advertising,
test a banner on a small level, and see how well it
converts, and this will give you an indication of how well
it converts on a larger level.
Affiliate Marketing/Joint Ventures Affiliate markting and
jv advertising are both similar in nature and. Most
professional web marketers would say that it delivers the
highest quality click thrus available on the web today.
This is because these types of marketing are endorsement
marketing where you have a particular person with certain
credentials promoting your product. This personal referral
often generates visitors who are hungry to see what you
offer.
You can use this type of marketing by writing a letter to a
potential partner who has a large customer base or by
installing affiliate software on your web site and
advertise for affiliate partners. Using an online affiliate
program is very cost effective because you reach targeted
visitors online and you only pay for leads or sales
(usually a percentage of your sale or a set dollar amount).
Popunders/Guaranteed Visitors/Expired Domains - These
traffic sources have been around for a while now and are
all heavily promoted forms of advertising. But in
comparison to the other forms of advertising, it does not
perform as well. Personally, I have experienced sending
millions of visitors from this type of traffic with hardly
recognizable results.
Most of this traffic is not very targeted because the web
site visitors did not get to the site by choice. Instead,
they were solicited from third party advertisers using
popunders or tricky web pages, which does not make that
person a qualified visitor to your web site. There are some
networks of advertisers who can provide quality popunders
at a reasonable price.
Click thrus are a way to measure the quality of advertising
because you can usually figure out how those clicks relate
to your sales. That is why it is important to focus on how
many click thrus you can produce when creating, marketing
and advertising your web site. So next time you by any type
of web advertising, try to get some indication of how many
targeted click thrus you can expect to generate from that
particular campaign, and you can get a good idea of how
many sales you can generate.
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Rod Davis is an Online Marketing Specialist who offers
"The Small Business Survival Guide" and an informative
newsletter called Microbusiness Marketing. Visit
microbusinessmedia.com or call 303-440-8196 for more
information..
More articles by Rod Davis - http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Rod-Davis-348/
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