Above And Beyond Promotion

Posts Tagged ‘Campaign’

Text-Link Advertising: Making the Most of Your Budget

Word Count:
772

Summary:
Make the most of your text-link advertising dollars with these tips.

Keywords:
text-link advertising, text link ad

Article Body:
Reading through a text-link advertising forum recently, I noticed a number of negative posts. One post in particular stuck in my mind and I want to answer it here.

The poster had been frustrated with his results from a text-link ad campaign. He mentioned that he was new to text-link advertising and he wasn’t getting any results.

My short answer to him would be, “Your text-link ads can get results, but you have to use the right text links and the right ads.”

My long answer follows, in the form of five key tips for any text-link advertising campaign:

1-First, make sure you have a product that’s good. In this case, your product is your website. Make sure it’s designed well, easy to navigate, with content people are interested in. Nothing is worse for a bad website than a good text-link ad campaign–you drive people to it once and then they never come back.

While you’re at it, be sure your website is designed to encourage visitors to do what you want them to do (i.e. click on CPC ads, buy your or your affiliate program’s products, etc.), ETHICALLY, of course.

2-Second, what’s your ad campaign objective? Before you spend a penny on text-link advertising, you need to decide what you want your ads to do for you. Do you just want more traffic to your site? Or do you want people to take some action once they get to your site (i.e., buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, etc.). Make sure you’re clear on what you want for your text-link ad dollars first.

3-Related to step 2, take advantage of any special features offered by the website you’ve placed your text-link ads on–especially if they offer conversion tracking. Conversion, for the uninitiated, means CONVERTING a visitor into either a customer (they buy a product), a subscriber (they sign up for your newsletter) or whatever other action you want to “CONVERT” your visitors into taking. Conversion tracking will help you figure out which of your text-link ads are getting you the kind of visitors you want.

4-Test, test, test. The beauty of most text-link advertising is that it’s not prohibitively expensive to advertise or test your ads (as long as you watch your spending limits). If you can, run a few different text-link ad variations.

Something to consider when creating your text-link ad: put yourself in your visitors’ shoes as much as possible. When you’re just surfing the web casually or looking for information in a broad sense, your searches tend to be broad, don’t they? But when you’re ready to buy, or take some other action, your searches are more narrow and your search terms are more specific to what you want.

For example, if you’re casually interested in bicycles, you might search just using that as your keyword, “bicycle.” But once you’ve decided to buy a bike, you’ll probably have something more specific in mind: “red ten-speed bikes” or “Mike’s Bike Shop.”

If you want your visitors to do something specific at your website, then your text-link ad should be as specific as possible.

Once you set up your text-link ad campaign, give it some time to see what ads work, at least a week or preferably a couple of weeks. Be aware of the season, or if a holiday weekend falls during your testing, as those factors will affect your text-link ads’ results.

5-And last but not least, don’t be afraid to make changes to your text-link ad campaign. Just make sure they’re incremental, and give each change some time to see if it works.

For example, pick the text-link ad that gives you the best conversion rate and tweak it, while you drop the others. Change the times and days of the week it appears (if you can) to find out when to schedule them. Or try another text-link ad variation.

Just make sure you make these changes to your text-link ads one at a time and keep track of them (enter your text-link ad changes into a diary or journal, for example) so you can easily measure their effect. A tweak as minor as changing a word or two in your text-link ad could increase your conversion rate significantly. Or it might not. So keep track of what works (and what doesn’t so you don’t repeat it).

Don’t make the mistake that poster made, throwing money at his text-link advertising and then cutting it off in frustration when it didn’t work. Make sure to set up your text-link ads properly and then tinker with them until you get the results you want.

Most business owners do not explore new marketing strategies until they experience a sharp decline in their revenue. Avertising campaigns are not evergreen. They evolve and grow, improve and degenerate. Most work at home, or small business owners shell out a substantial amount of money for a good ad campaign and then let it run dry.

The first strategy for success is found in the way you view the advertising campaign’s purpose. A good advertising campaign needs to do three things. First, it needs to collect data on the market. Who is buying. What is hot, and what is not.

Second, it needs to collect vital information about the people who make a purchase from your website. This can be compiled into a profile that helps you determine how to best reach your target market. It is a market research tool that helps determine what types of advertising works, at what times of the year.

Third, it should ‘brand’ your name and logo. A successful advertising campaign will imprint the company name and logo onto people’s subconscious. This increase their ‘decision to buy’ response when they visit the website

For example, online shopping increases dramatically just before Christmas, but only if the payment gateway is fast and easy to use. However, if the user must leave the website to use the payment gateway, like paypal.com uses, then the statistics do not change. However, the payment gateway does not effect sales in the summer.

You’ll notice that no aspect of an advertising campaign is to sell the product ? that is your website’s job. A successful marketing campaign manager never measure’s an advertising campaign’s success based on sales.

Large corporations will tell you that a successful advertising campaign may run for months before the results appear on the income statement.

The advertising campaign should be reviewed often, and compared to new methods, in the hunt for new ‘hot markets.’ However, hot markets burn out very quickly. The whirlwind of change that continuously sweeps through the marketplace is a powerful balancer. It gives small businesses an edge over the elephants that move slow and react to change in months, not weeks.

This is true, but there needs to be balance. Always keep 80% of the marketing budget in the tried and true marketing methods ? even if they do not offer the big rewards. The other 20% of the marketing budget is free for exploration of new advertising mediums. Don’t discount anything. Look at the fortunes made when youtube.com and myspace.com skyrocketed to fame. For a few months, advertisers were raking in millions.

It is also important to keep a finger on the pulse of the population. There is a time to brand your company, and a time to break away from the pack and create a new image for yourself like Calvin Cline did with their underwear commercials.

The important thing to remember is to focus. Calvin Cline didn’t try to sell underwear to all age groups, they focused on a narrow niche. Work at home and small business owners need to learn this lesson ? niche marketing is the secret to making millions.

The potential is expansive. Clever competition and new technology should be seen as marketing tools, not threats. Staying on the cutting edge is all about innovation and creativity. Money is no longer the #1 element to success. Many small businesses are becoming international on small budgets.

Advertising your services or products on the Internet is
both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There
are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your
website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose
from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine
optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are
targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of
search engine results as possible. One of the differences
is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign
versus months for a good SEO campaign.

Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that
most search engines, including some of the largest ones,
now offer. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which
translates to your company paying the bid amount every time
the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is
the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your
website traffic, your site often appears in the results of
other prevalent search engines.

As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and
disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor
your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very
effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never
have to tweak your web pages to change your position in
search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO
campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click
campaign is pay a fee.

Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click
process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t
demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more
you know about search engines and keywords, the easier -
and more effective – the process will be.

The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding
war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on
search engine results. This means that you will have to
raise your bid to regain your position – which can
obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are
bidding on a popular keyword.

In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective
form of marketing for your business, you must do some
computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site
is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit
you make on your website over a given period of time by the
total number of visitors for that same time period. For
example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were
2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50
cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.

The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which
your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show
a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you
are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.

Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost
considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way
around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be
paying too much for each individual hit.

The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything
you can about search engine keyword research. The good news
is there isn’t a limit to the amount of keywords you can
add to your bid because additional keywords do not add
additional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle for
you because there is no need to optimize your site to index
a particular set of keywords.

Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than
others are, but they will not cost you anything except time
to set-up your account in your pay-per-click bid. Of the
popular search engines that offer pay-per-click, one called
Overture provides an online tool that will give you the
data on how often particular keywords are entered into
their search engine. They also offer suggestions for
keywords after you enter a description of your site.

In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. You
must understand that the object of your description is not
to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as
possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy
your service or product go to your site. You must use
expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is
both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal
candidates to your site. This description is your most
powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.

Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is
that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important
that you bear in mind that the results of the top search
engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are
Overture and Adwords Select, usually appear on other
popular search engines. Because of this, the competition
for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find
that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click
to yield a profit.

If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on
that particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when
you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in
essence losing the bidding war.

Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in
place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword.
It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a
monthly basis.

Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis
of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about
consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring
and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business
needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click
campaign is a success.

Often, sites view seo and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step. Read the rest of this entry »

For promotional products to succeed in a marketing campaign, they must be relevant and wanted by a large audience. The promotional products must be useful, new and hip. Matching your promotional products to the latest market trends can increase the overall success of your marketing campaign. Read the rest of this entry »