Do you know what is wrong with doing business on the Internet? Oh sure, sp*am is a real issue for most people, but it only emphasizes the point I would like to share with you today.
See the problem is locating productive methods of advertising.
THE EARLY EVOLUTION OF A NEW ONLINE BUSINESS
Most people are of the mind that the website itself is the only form of advertising one actually needs. But when they realize that getting listed in the search engines in a way that will actually drive traffic to their website is much harder than it seems, then people are driven to find a better way to advertise. Herein lies the problem.
If you were to build your website and wait for people to come, the only page views that you would see on your page counter are those that you have made to the site yourself to be sure that it was truly working as designed. Are you going to be buying your own products? Certainly not. You need paying customers to come visit your website so that you can begin to see some sales.
Then you submit your site to the search engines. If you were to wait for a time to see who comes from the search engines, you might notice in your server logs that the search engine spiders came to visit shortly after submitting your site to them. Although you have submitted your site and noticed the spider came to your domain, you may not see your link in the spider’s parent search engine for several more days, weeks or months.
The long and short of it is that although you are working in the real-time environment of the web, your new site may not receive traffic by its own merits until a good six months after you first build it. That is not exactly what you had in mind, is it?
The next thing you might notice is that when your link begins appearing in the search engine results, your search keywords will not present your website in the top 200 results. Bear in mind that appearing in the top 200 results means nothing in the real world. Few people will click through to see results deeper than the first 20 results.
SEPARATE YOURSELF FROM THE MASSES
Most people will not begin to generate an income from their online endeavors until they have spent some time beating their heads against the brick wall. However, when you know what to do, you can begin to turn a slow profit until you learn enough to begin to earn an actual living online.
The trick is in learning what to do to generate sales and turn a profit.
This is the step in the process that you should begin to depart from the ways of the masses. Most turn to free advertising or non-productive paid advertising.
Advertising should not be free. Oh sure, there is free advertising available, but good advertising is not free!
In the real world of advertising, you can place free ads all day long, but your free ads may generate only one visitor for every 10,000 ad exposures. And then notice that it may take 200 visitors to get one sale. Under this formula, You must be exposed to 2,000,000 people to get one sale! In the free advertising world, those free ads may have cost you 50 labor hours to turn one sale. Unless your profit margin is in the range of $350 to $1000 per sale, then you will not be earning what your online time should be worth to you!
Paid advertising on the other hand is often very different. Paid advertising models that have been around for a while generally produce profits for their customers.
THE LESSON ABOUT PAID ADVERTISING
If you learn nothing else from this article, let me share with you a very important lesson about paid advertising. People will not continue to buy advertising in one medium unless that medium continues to produce the sales and profits the advertiser seeks and needs. By investing some time and research in different advertising mediums, you will begin to notice that certain types of advertisers return to the medium again and again. News Flash: Advertisers return to an advertising medium over and again because the medium works… the medium continues to generate enough sales to pay the advertising costs and then some.
WHAT ADVERTISING METHODS ARE PROVEN
The effectiveness of one advertising medium over another is entirely dependent upon what type of product or service is being sold.
If you were to take a moment to “think outside of the Internet box,” you would soon realize that the advertising medium with the highest long-term performance and proof of concept is any medium that existed in the pre-Internet world, a.k.a. offline advertising.
Magazine and newspaper classifieds have been used by mail-order businesses since the beginning of print advertising. These mediums have proven themselves very successful throughout their long history. When you realize that an Internet business is a lot like a normal offline mail-order business, you will understand what I am trying to tell you.
While there are a few online advertising mediums that have been proven over the long haul, they are few and far between. There is simply too much misinformation on the web about what advertising medium’s work, to know just where you should spend your online advertising dollar.
My experience has shown that the best place online to place your advertising dollars is in search engine placement, pay-per-click search engines, some ezine advertising, and creating articles for the free-reprint marketplace.
While some companies have seen success with pop-up ads and banner advertising, neither is suitable for my purposes. And unless you are dealing with tangible, inexpensive products, they are probably not suitable to your purposes either.
IN CONCLUSION
You must take time to study what works and what does not. Too many people who own an online business are stuck in the mindset that they must advertise in the online environment only. The truth is that you should consider all forms of advertising — both online and offline advertising. And most importantly, you should forget free advertising and focus your time and effort on paid advertising that works.
John Calder is the owner/editor of The Ezine Dot Net.
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