| |
|
Advertising and PPC
Advertising can be an easy way to break
into the internet but there are many downsides to it. Unless you
are running a community based site, have a site offering very unique
content, a valuable service or product the traffic usually only
comes as long as your paying for it. Of course ad campaigns can
also be very expensive to run and maintain so you need to be sure
your squeezing everything you can out of it. You should only proceed
with a ad campaign if you are positive your site is the best it
can be, otherwise you may just be pouring money away. There are
thousands of companies on the internet who offer to provide you
with ad campaigns, many of which never deliver, do not let any of
these points put you off advertising.
If you want quality traffic with affordable prices
you are recommended to stick with the major search engines and their
partners. Google Adwords, Overture and MSN are all well respected
companies which will deliver you the best traffic. All of the forementioned
websites use pay per click systems which can be perfect as they
drive traffic with keywords you specify directly at your site, these
advertisers are all interlinked with the main search engines so
you should expect to get the most widespread sections of the population
from them. Because they have the traffic numbers to support ad campaigns
there can sometimes be bidding wars on popular keywords, I advise
you to stay away from popular keywords and do your research. Overture
provides a free Keyword Selector Tool which can help you find out
how much traffic similiar keywords recieve each month, these are
usually a lot cheaper and still provide the same high quality traffic.
As I mentioned before advertising wont necessarily
mean a good flow of traffic after you stop paying, other routes
of advertising can mean you get listed in a search engines immediately
for a set fee. Yahoo offers the ability to pay for a index within
their search engine or directory, although your site still needs
to abide by the same rules as other sites it gives you the opportunity
to get indexed immediately within the search engine, a more subtle
way of advertising power. Alternatively you can find quality sites
that are related to yours on Sitepoint.com and WebHostingTalk.com
who may be willing to put a one way link up for a nominal fee.
You may find websites on the internet offering "banner
exchanges", "free traffic" and other such promises,
I wouldent look at them twice unless you want to lose out. The traffic
they send you is of the worst quality, many of these websites operate
bots, own networks of link farms and even pay people to visit your
site. This of course means that no one being referred from these
sites are actually interested in your content or services, in worst
case scenarios you may even end up being banned from search engines
due to these malicious sites. Even if they are reputable companies
it is hard to judge whether they will work for you, many of the
smaller search engine companies simply do not get the traffic to
give you value for money.
|
|
