Advertising Options; and the winner

is!

Are you chasing search engine traffic and pondering your options? Almost anyone on the internet these days would love to increase traffic to thier website regardless of their "niche".

Clearly search engines have the potential to deliver a steady flow of targeted traffic to your website. Listed below are several suggestions for efficient use of your money when it comes to getting traffic to your website.

Here are 3 basic areas to consider:

1. Placing some key targeted pages on the internet that are SEO'ed to draw traffic back to your primary website.

2. Using Google "pay per click" campaigns with your favorite suite of targeted keywords.

3. Placing carefully targeted content on your website homepage.

If you are working on a limited budget it may be best to consider Options #1 and #3 as your first choices. The pay per click traffic generators can get to be very expensive in a short time, and these will continue to cost you money while each campaign is active.

If your focus is on pay per click, be sure to spend adequate time and effort to research and generate a list of relevant and effective keywords. There are many tools for helping with this task available on the internet and once your campaign is launched you can start to monitor and test your conversions. If you are promoting your own product you can always reinvest your earnings to continue your campaign and grow your income.

Another option for drawing traffic to your website is based on the use of custom written articles and other targeted content. You can use your budget to have some unique articles written on your favorite key topics, but this can be very expensive and time consuming. Articles such as these can be submitted to article directories and published on other content hungry websites.

The best alternative for content may be that of Private Label website resources such Infogoround.com and webcontentmonthly.com. Using these Private Label content services, even on a limited budget, can over time easily provide thousands of articles that can be put to good work in drawing targeted traffic to your website. Imagine hundreds of new articles each month on a topic of your choice...articles that you can use just as if you had written them yourself! And of course PL content can be added directly to your own website or used in a variety of other ways for drawing traffic (blogs, newsletters, etc.).

This is just a glimpse of the power of content and other ways that can be used to draw traffic to your website. Be sure to explore your options and use your time and money wisely in the process.

Advertising on a budget

Frequency, Frequency, Frequency

This is the third article of a three-part series. I'm illustrating the marketing challenges of PrescottWeddings.com, a small business.

If you don't remember anything else about marketing, remember this: Frequency is king.

The more often you can get your name in front of your potential and current customers, the more likely you will make a sale.

Depending on what study you look at, people need to see your message anywhere from three to 27 times before they act upon it.

And, if you want to brand your business, then you need to get it in front of your customers as often as possible.

How do you think Ivory Soap, Campbell Soup and Tide all built their brands so deeply into our minds? Through years and years of repeatedly advertising. That's why those brands pop into our head when we think about soap, soup or laundry detergent.

So if you want to build your brand, then you need to advertise frequently.

There's another benefit to advertising frequently. It also helps your current customers.

People like to know they made the right decision after they purchased something. How much reassurance they need depends on how much they spend, but everyone needs some confirmation they made the right decision. Your advertising can help.

Studies have shown that people are more aware of car ads after they purchased a car -- specifically car ads of the model they bought. And they're more likely to both believe and approve of the message. Again, because they want to know they made the right decision.

So there are many good reasons to advertise frequently. Does that mean you have to spend a fortune? Not necessarily. There are a few tricks you can use to get the frequency you need at a low cost. (These are print tricks -- other advertising outlets, such as radio and online, we'll talk about in future issues.)

1. Make your ad as small as possible. Small ads cost less. See "Advertising on a Budget - Part 2: Thinking Small" for more information on shrinking your ad.

2. It's better to schedule your ads to run all at once than spread them out. People will never remember when they don't see your ad, only when they do. If they see your ad a lot in one week, they're going to be under the impression you advertise all the time because they won't remember NOT seeing your ad other weeks.

3. Take advantage of any frequency programs your newspaper offers. And definitely sign a contract -- don't run ads under the open rate.

Here's how it worked for PWC.

The newspaper had a program called "3 For Free." If you ran an ad three days in a row, you got the next three days for free (the paper was published six days a week).

We designed a tiny ad -- a one by two inch ad -- and we ran it six days in a row. Then we skipped the next three weeks and did the same thing again the next month.

After a year of doing this, PWC had people coming up to her telling her they saw her ad "all the time." Business owners wanted to advertise on PWC because they could see the commitment PWC had to advertising. Brides and grooms were visiting PWC on a regular basis because they were being "reminded" monthly.

What did all this cost? About $100 a month.

But, a word of caution. It takes time to build a business and a brand. It won't happen overnight. But it will happen, especially if you remember to keep getting your name in front of your customers and potential customers as often as you possibly can.