Free internet marketing strategies & tips. Learn how to utilize the web to promote your business online.
Any advertiser looking to market his or her product online has many options to choose from, but no matter what the method of advertising, the ultimate goal is to bring interested visitors to the website and convert them into making a purchase. The quality and quantity of traffic brought in through advertising are both important factors in deciding the Returns on Investment (ROI) of any marketer.
In traditional media, the norm is that paid advertising is more effective than free advertising. On the internet, however, this doesn’t always hold true. The internet is far more individual-oriented and hence more targeted than traditional forms of media. While an ad may be less widespread online, its effectiveness and ROI are very high, especially for small businesses. On the internet, free advertising may be your best bet.
Take two examples of online marketing – pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and advertising through Search Engine Marketing (SEM). PPC is one of the most popular forms of internet advertising, wherein the advertiser displays his ads in the form of text or image boxes on selected websites, and pays a fee for every visitor that comes through from the publisher’s website to his own. The most popular type of PPC website is Google Adwords, and can be seen not only on blogs and sites all over the web in the form of Google sponsored links, but also on the paid results column in Google’s own search result pages.
PPC advertising can be profitable for advertisers, but the success of any Adwords campaign depends on two important factors: the quality of keywords chosen by the advertiser and the amount paid for each clickthrough. In PPC advertising it is crucial to choose the right keywords so that the ad can be displayed next to the most click-friendly and sales-inducing content. Additionally, the more you pay, the higher your chances of being displayed in Google’s top results for the most popular pages and search engine results.
These factors can make PPC advertisements a challenge for small businesses, especially those who are new to online marketing. If you don’t pick the right keywords, you could end up losing a lot of money for clickthroughs that never result in sales.
Another drawback of paid advertising is that users don’t come online looking for ads, but for content and credibility. Even with high visibility and optimized keywords, paid ads don’t offer the legitimacy and credibility that can be offered by organic forms of online advertising. On the internet, building credibility for a product is both important and challenging, and organic content is the best way to pull the right kind of visitors – for free!
Search Engine Marketing avoids the pitfalls of PPC advertising. In SEM, the marketer’s goal is to gain the top spots on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for his targeted keywords. This involves creating search-friendly pages with deep content and quality backlinks. Through strategic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and organic marketing, the product or service that an advertiser is trying to sell will appear in the organic search results of top search engines. This has many distinct advantages over paid advertising. When users search for a product or keyword online, most of them click on organic results instead of the paid advertisements. Second, organic results have much more credibility than paid advertisements because a website has to already be popular and well-regarded to appear in the top results. Last, but most importantly, SEM is free and once an effective SEM campaign is underway, traffic builds manifold, cultivating both new and repeat visitors.
While SEM is no doubt more time-consuming and challenging than paid advertising, it would be a mistake to start with a PPC campaign before an organically sound website has been built. The best and most effective use of pay-per-click campaigns is as a supplement to Search Engine Marketing.
