Promoting Your Site

Website Promotion

Once you have a website up and running and your search engine optimization is all in place it is time to start promoting your website to drive traffic to it.

And we are not looking for just any traffic, what we want to accomplish is to get very targeted traffic to the site.  Targeted traffic are visitors to your site who are looking to buy what you are selling or to use your service.  It does a site no good if there are thousands of the visitors if none of them are interested in your product or service.

Reaching Your Customers

There many ways reach your customers, some traditional and some are exclusive to the Internet.  Some traditional ways of promoting your website, that I’m sure you’re aware of, are newspapers, the Yellow Pages, magazines and radio and TV.

These traditional ways of advertising your business are not very targeted.  In fact, they are quite passive and they rely on the customer needing your product or service when they see your ad.

But what if you could create and ad on the Internet that works 24/7 and that would attract customers who are looking for your product or service right now!

This type of advertising is called pay per click advertising (PPC).  These advertisements are the ones that people see in the results when they do a search.  The name of this type of advertising explains how you are charged for these advertisements.

There are many search engines on the Internet and almost all of them have some sort of pay per click advertising.  Google is the best-known and certainly the most used search engine on the web so we will use them as an example, however, the Microsoft adCenter (which is the combined Yahoo, and Bing) alternative to Google Adwords should not be ignored.

Just like your search engine optimization the most important words in your Adwords advertising are the keywords that relate to the topic of your website and to the products that you were trying to sell.

These are keywords or key phrases that people type into use when they are looking for products and services or for information.  These are based on old-fashioned common sense.

Naturally, there are variations of any keyword or key phrase.  For example, if you were a dog trainer, your main keyword would be “dog training.”  However, other keywords or key phrases would be “training your dog”, “how to train your dog”, or even more specifically “training German Shepherds” or “training Great Danes.”

The headline of your online advertisement needs to contain the keyword that you are targeting.  The rest of your advertisement needs to be thought out and support your product or service and direct the reader to your website.

One of the advantages of this type of advertising is that you get you bid on your keywords for the position you want and to set your budget on a per day basis so that you have complete control over your costs.

The best way to write your pay per click advertising is to examine the top six or eight positions of your competition when you do a search for your own keyword.  Analyze these ads, emulate them but do not copy them exactly.  See what these other advertisers are doing and then look for ways that you can either do it better or fill in the gaps that they are leaving.

It is true that PPC advertising can be very expensive but with the correct selection of keywords, budget, and analysis it can drive some very targeted prospects to your site.

Be sure to check out our blog or better yet subscribe to our newsletter to find out more information, tips and tricks on managing your Adwords campaign.