Advertising Online 101

If your website is branded and your visitor traffic is above the thousand plus mark per day then you are probably not too worried about online advertising. However, if your website only gets a handful of clicks a day, then you are probably always thinking about how to get more traffic. One way is advertising online.

There are unlimited places for advertising online. There are free ad services and paid ad services. Many websites even offer advertising for a fee, for link exchanges, or in exchange for working programs. You can put links or banners in some email signatures, or in forum signature lines. You can even advertise yourself (website or product) on your own website. This kind of online advertising usually involves a text link or a banner ad linked to your website or product splash page.

Most often however, people pay to place an ad on a search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN (there are literally thousands of search engines). Advertising online with search engines will cost you money and is definitely more complicated than simply listing your website link somewhere. The trick is to get more clicks, and ultimately sales, than the cost of your ad(s). So many people throw away their money because they do not know how to place ads or understand how the search engines work.

Very briefly, the search engines are programmed with complex algorithms that not only search what you type in your browser window, but categorize, sample, and rank all the matching searches and display them in a list ranked (usually) by most popular – the website that has been opened the most. The exact ranking criteria changes every so often, just to make things interesting. The important thing to remember is that you want the most visitors (which will hopefully lead to sales) without spending a fortune in the process.

There are several different schools of thought on how online ads should be written. There are many seminars, programs, and eBooks dedicated to teaching people how to write the perfect online advertisement. The first thing you need to learn about are keywords. Keywords are what the search engines use to compile their lists of relevant websites and web pages. Your keywords from your advertisement should match the keywords used to promote your website. For instance, if you have a website that sells DVDs your keywords might be ‘DVDs’ and ‘movies.’ In this case you’ll want to use these keywords in your ad as well.

All keywords cost money. Different words or phrases cost more or less depending on how many online ads there are using those keywords. As demand goes up, so does the price. Therefore, in the previous example, ‘DVDs’ and ‘movies’ might be too expensive for you to compete with Blockbuster, Netflix, or E3Flix. There are programs that help you evaluate the cost of keywords so you can get an estimate on how much advertising online will cost you. Finding less expensive keywords than your competition will enable you to rank higher in the search engines (and to be seen more often by those searching) for less money.

One tactic is to find keywords that are being searched a lot, but with few or no ad campaigns. Then either bid higher for those words or find similar words or phrases that you can bid less on and rank higher with. If you can use keywords effectively, you can outrank any other website on the Internet. I know someone who regularly uses keywords to get his websites ranked at the top of search results. In one instance, he used the city name of the city he lives in to get his site ranked higher than the official city webpage.

Understanding how to use keywords is important and should be thoroughly researched. You will need to get a keyword search tool; learn how to write copy for online advertising; and learn how and where to place those ads. You can find much of this information online for free, but you may consider investing in some eBooks, manuals, or programs to help you get started and be as successful as possible.

About the Author:  Glenn Schreider is a business professional with 18+ years experience in management, sales and marketing. For more information visit http://www.BestNetResults.com.