One tried and true way to get traffic to your site is advertising. Ask any web denizen about advertising and they talk PPC (covered last session). But there are lots of other ways to advertise.
You can advertise your site in print. For instance, if you run a landscaping business you can build a site and then advertise your site’s URL in print ads in the newspaper or appropriate magazines. If your site is what they call a “money site,” that is, if you sell from your site, you may be able to do this as well. For instance, let’s say you sell an online dog training course. You can advertise that site in print: try newspapers and dog magazines or other printed publications that might appeal to readers who are your target customers. By the way, you don’t need to advertise in a big splashy way. A simple classified ad can do it.
Did you know you can also advertise on Ebay? Now I’m no expert here–I only heard about this recently, but apparently you can buy advertising on Ebay, too, and I heard it was pretty reasonable.
You can also advertise on other people’s websites. This gets trickier, but it can be very effective. First, you need to identify likely sites. You don’t want to go to outright competitors but you do want to find sites that work compatibly with your offer. For instance, if you’re selling dog training courses, websites on dogs (that don’t offer training courses) are an obvious match. If you’re selling an online drawing course, art websites that don’t sell courses are a good fit.
Identify the appropriate websites and contact the webmaster (go to the Contact Us button–it’s on most websites although it’s often teeny-tiny). Ask if they accept advertising (you can often figure this out by just looking at the site to see if it shows ads). Then ask for rates. Rates are all over the map so feel free to negotiate. You want to post what are called “banner ads.” These are little color picture ads that a host will put on his site for a fee. Your ad should be clickable so that the person looking at it can click through to get to your offer.
With PPC, you pay for each click. With a banner ad, you pay for “impressions,” that is, you pay that it appears (or is “impressed”) on the site a certain number of times. I’ve heard internet guys say that banner ads can be the most effective mode of advertising–but a lot depends on the type of offering you have, the type of compatible sites that are out there, and your budget.
When designing a banner ad, you should try different things and test. It’s amazing but color and headline and even font can make a difference–that is, you may find that orange banners are clicked twice as often as gray banners. You can design the banner yourself (you can get specs from the website where you want your banner to be placed) or you can go online and find online sources that do them quickly and cheaply. You can also use Elance or RentACoder to design some banners for you.
But advertising need not stop there. You can also try to advertise your offering by finding things that attract your target audience. Let’s say you are selling membership to a site for diabetes patients. If a local hospital in your town decided to kick off a health fair, you could go out and rent a small booth or pay for a program ad or otherwise participate–to get word out to local people about your diabetes site. You could even get cheap business cards made (go online) and hand them out to fair visitors.
The key to alternative advertising of your site is to be creative. Think about your site(s) and constantly be looking at things that would work compatibly. Health fairs are natural tie-ins to health websites. Ebay is a great add-on if you’re selling “stuff.” Advertising on a “work at home” site is a good place to let the world know about your “make money raising earthworms” course.
The other thing you have to remember is that advertising is relentless. You can’t do one ad one time and figure you’re done. You need to advertise constantly and creatively and consistently.
This brings up another subject: branding. I’m not a big fan of branding the way Madison Avenue defines it. I think that branding is like theology–it’s a complicated topic that is mainly discussed by people who don’t get it. This isn’t to say that branding isn’t important–but a good brand does not mean you’ll make money (Edsel is a great brand–it’s memorable even years after the car was no longer manufactured). By the same token, a poorly or even unbranded product can be quite profitable.
Here are good ways to do branding in your traffic efforts:
- Go for easy consistency. If you have multiple products in your niche, try to keep a similar look, color scheme, fonts, and even tone. If you are selling your writing services, try to have your business cards match your website and both should match your stationery. However, I wouldn’t sink thousands of dollars into getting logos designed or having logo-identified shipping boxes … unless you’re very big and very rich.
- True branding is more about the intangibles associated with your product or service. My writing business is LeQ Medical and we’re about not only writing but highly personalized customer service. We don’t have a menu of services–we will “cook to order” what the client wants. We also know our clients very well. We try to make it fun and easy to deal with us. That’s more of our brand than my logo. (Some people get hung up on logos.)
- Speaking of logos, I have a WorkingTexasWriter logo that I had done (it is at the top of this post) but it’s not on the WorkingTexasWriter website. I like the logo, just not sure I want to use it. Why? Because I guess I don’t really get logos. I spent a lot of years in the corporate world where every product manager wanted his or her own logo. I once had to produce a specification sheet (a one-page sales-type sheet) that looked like a race car it had so many logos–there was the company logo, the division logo, then the product logo–and the product had a dozen fancy features and three of those features had logos! Every logo you have diminishes the value of the other logos. Look at Coca-Cola–one logo.
- Your brand is your reputation. If you sell a dog-training course, you should have a reputation. Are you the most thorough? The most oriented toward sheep dogs? The cheapest? The most fun? The most luxurious upscale place? Find your identity and build a reputation around it. If you sell a drawing course online–what’s it like? Are you super-easy? Aimed at kids? Are only for advanced people? Is it very basic and inexpensive or do you pamper your clients? That’s a brand. You need to be true to yourself and who you are.
If you think of branding as your reputation, just be sure your website is true to your reputation. If you run a web design business, your web design should be cool and show off some of the bells and whistles you know how to do. If your website sells dog-training courses and you think of yourself as the upscale pampered version of obedience training, make sure your website has a high-end look. If you sell inexpensive how-to-draw information for school kids, make it clear from all aspects of your website that you’re all about youngsters.
That’s it’s for advertising … tomorrow’s topic is Public Relations.
