Evaluating Your Online Advertising Options

Evaluating Your Online Advertising Options

Okay, in Wise Product Selection Means Success we looked briefly at some of the options available for products to sell online. Now we’re going to explore the marketing and promotion of your product or service. There are two ways to go about promoting your stuff online. One is to pay for advertising and promotion, the other is to learn how to promote your business for free.

There have been volumes written on each method, especially how to do it for free. In this piece we’ll be looking at a couple of the more effective paid advertising methods and devote the balance of the piece to exploring the many methods for getting free targeted traffic to your Website.

Paid Advertising
There are many ways to spend your money for advertising online. One of the more popular and effective methods is pay per click (PPC). The concept is simple. People search for products day and night. The most popular search engine by far is Google. Google also operates the most popular PPC program called Google AdWords.

When an individual searches for something online he types certain phrases into the search field of a search engine. The words used in the search are referred to as keywords. Results reflecting the keywords appear on the screen. Most of the results contain links pointing to Websites with products and/or information relating to the search phrase. But along with these results you almost always find Sponsored Links. These find their way onto the page relative to the keywords used in the search phrase.

Sponsored links are there because people have paid for them to be there. The cost of an ad varies depending on the popularity of the keywords the advertiser has purchased. For example, working from home is very popular these days. Consequently, if an advertiser wants his ad to appear when the phrase ‘work from home’ is searched, he will pay a high premium. He pays a set fee only when someone clicks on his ad. And regardless of what happens after a visitor clicks on his ad, he pays for the click, thus the name, pay per click.

Now say an advertiser is selling buggy whips and purchases sponsored links when that particular phrase is searched. Since the demand for buggy whips is extremely low in comparison to ‘work from home’ or any other hot search phrase, the cost of a click for a buggy whip ad is much lower. There are many companies offering PPC advertising and Google is the leader.

When determining whether this type of advertising will work you must take into consideration the price per click and the average number of clicks it takes to actually make a sale. Obviously, if the price to get a sale is less than the total costs to deliver the product to the customer the advertising probably makes sense.

There are other paid advertising methods available to marketers. There’s banner advertising, newsletter advertising, paid product reviews, and more. The favored method of the moment is PPC.

That’s an overview on paid Web advertising. Right now PPC is the rage but whether it will stay hot remains to be seen. The real fun in promoting your business online comes from getting targeted traffic for free. That’s the topic of Getting Free Traffic Using SEO.

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