There are two basic methods of advertising on the internet.
The free method, involves bootstrap Guerilla
marketing. This is the method I prefer.
The basic idea is to get as much traffic to your site as
possible. Traffic comes from links. Good links bring relevant,
qualified traffic to your site. This is the type of traffic
that converts well.
Here are some ideas:
Submit your website to DMOZ,
The Open Directory Project. It's the world's largest hand
edited directory, with over 590,000 categories. It can take
some time to get a listing, but it is free, and very high
quality.
Cultivate incoming links. Develop great unique content,
with generous portions of link
bait. Wait for those incoming links to develop. Reciprocal
link campaigns are also a great way to bring traffic to
your site. Just make sure the links are high quality and
relevant.
Use social networking sites like MySpace to link to your
website. Join some forums related to your web site, and
drop your url when it is relevant and appropriate to do
so. It might take a year or two, but is it ever worth it.
Add your url on Wikepedia,
on a relevant page. It must be a great resource, though,
if you want it to stay.
The pay method involves paying for traffic.
PPC
Google Adwords
Adwords has the biggest share of the Pay Per Click (PPC)
market. They make it easy to set up an account, and the
interface is pretty easy to use. You set up an account with
your credit card, and then start by setting up a campaign
based upon your keywords. Be forewarned, however, that Adwords
can and will rack up huge credit card charges, especially
if you just use a bunch of generic keywords.
For example, the keyword 'plasma tv' PPC bids are $3.50
per click, and 2000 people search for this keyword everyday.
If you got a 15% clickthru rate, you would have 300 clicks
per day, at $3.50 each, for a daily total of $1,050.00 per
day, or $31,500 per month. When people search for 'cheap
plasma tv' or 'what is plasma tv', your PPC ad will show.
These types of keywords generate high levels of traffic,
high PPC bills, and low conversion rates.
I would highly recommend negative keywords.
Using 'plasma tv' as an example, a negative keyword would
be '-cheap'. In other words, whenever the word 'cheap' is
included with 'plasma tv' on a search, your ad will not
be triggered. Make sure you have some type of conversion
tracking on your site, and expand your negative keyword
list to include poorly converting keywords.
It's also a good idea at some point, to use split
testing to optimize your landing pages, and get the
highest conversion rates possible for your site.
Tip: Pay close attention to your keyword conversion
rates, and bid accordingly.
Yahoo Search Marketing
YSM has a much smaller portion of the PPC market. Their
interface is not as easy as Adwords, and it can be confusing
at first. On the positive side, though, it's much easier
to understand the concept. The higher the bid, the higher
your position on the page. Of course, you want to maximize
your ROI, by having high clickthru and conversion rates.
Directory submissions
Yahoo Directory
The Yahoo directory cost $299 per year, which makes it the
highest priced directory. You'll have to decided yourself
it's worth the money.
Best
of the Web
The Best of the Web directory, at $69.00 per year, has been
around for quite a while. It is a good value for the price,
when compared to Yahoo.
