Lately you have been hearing a lot about targeted advertising. To convert a major percentage of your site visitors into buyers and maximize the return on your advertising dollar you need to target your advertising. But what is targeted advertising? To gain insight you first need to answer the following questions:
-Is your product gender related? (males, females or both)
-Is your product age related? (Toddlers, kids, teens, young adults, the middle ages, elders)
-Which particular interest group will your product appeal to most? (Home, entertainment, education, personal, Health, small business, corporations etc.)
-Who will most likely buy your product? (School kids, parents, home based moms, nurses etc.)
If you have answered all the above questions, you will realize that for instance if you are selling toddlers toys, its a waste of your money and efforts to advertise in business magazines. To be sure you might make some sales if you advertise persistently but you won’t get a good return on your investment.
So how do you go about targeted advertising. Here are a few online techniques which if done properly could in fact explode your sales:
1.Get your site listed in the search engines for appropriate keywords.
2. Use your keywords on the search engines to find sites of similar interest and exchange your links with them.
3.Get involved in keyword bidding. You can get best results at http://www.goto.com and http://www.findwhat.com .
4.Get involved in pay per click search engines. An excellent resource on this is http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/
5.Get listed in directories related to your particular interest. You can find directories of interest using various search engines.
6.Search for ezines that relate to your target audience and advertise. You may use the following resources to search for ezines.
http://www.ezinesearch.com
http://www.liszt.com
http://www.ezineseek.com
http://www.pennmedia.com/
http://ejournal.coalliance.org/
7.Of course you may participate in various discussion forums of interest .This can be very time consuming. You can search for the appropriate forum at:
http://www.forumone.com
http://www.liszt.com
http://www.dejanews.com
8.Advertise in related classified sections of Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Lycos.
Shahnaz Rauf is a freelancer actively seeking writing projects. She is also The Editor of The Monster Twister, a Newsletter helping ordinary web owners achieve extraordinary heights without losing their shirts. To Subscribe themonstertwister-subscribe@snzeport.com Or visit her website at http://www.snzeport.com
