| Internet advertising is a very broad term which encompasses hundreds of different methods, all designed to get you traffic and customers. There are many places that you can buy internet advertising: any of the search engines (with Pay Per Click - PPC - Advertising), on business websites that attract similar customers to your business, in E zines (online magazines), on paid classified advertising sites, and more.
Sometimes you don't even need to buy internet advertising. You can do it for free on the social networking sites, forums that are relevant to your business or products/services or through article marketing.
But before you start advertising for free or otherwise, you need to first figure out who you are advertising to and what they are looking for. The more specific you can get about this, the more effective your advertising will be so you need to put in quite a bit of thought and research into this. Where can you find what people are looking for? One of the easiest ways is to do some keyword research. You can use many of the free keyword research tools to see exactly what people in your business area are typing into the search engines. You can then use these keywords in many of your online marketing and advertisements.
You can then go about designing your own internet advertising campaign or you can choose an agency or service to do one for you. Doing it on your own when first starting out may be long and tedious, but hiring someone to do the work for you can be expensive. If you decide to pay an agency, do some research on which one fits your needs best first. Also, it's better if you can find someone who will actually explain their processes and methods to you--not a company that just takes care of it all for you. This is how you can start learning to make your ads more effective as well.
PPC ads are one form of paid online advertising and perhaps the most popular. These are the ads that you see on the right-hand side of your computer screen when you click a term in your search engine browser. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN, but there are hundreds more out there. With PPC advertising, you create an advertisement based on a keyword or keywords that people are searching for on the internet (after you've done your keyword research). You then pay the search engine each time someone clicks on your advertisement.
With E zine advertising, you choose an e zine that fits your target market and place ads within its newsletters. The prices of these ads depend on the size and quality of the e zine subscriber list.
Many business websites grant you the possibility to advertise on their sites as well. Again, prices here will vary.
When you buy internet advertising, you must also make sure that you are tracking which ads work and which ones don't. This is the only way you can improve your traffic and conversions. |