Online Marketing Strategies 101
By John Tahan
There's two major ways to advertise online, one is using paid advertising programs and
the other one is using free advertising platforms. The idea is to send targeted internet traffic
to an offer in order to get responses and feedback from interested prospects.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising can come in different forms but the most popular ones are called: SEM
(search engine marketing) using PPC (pay-per-click), display advertising, shopping networks,
video advertising using Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Yahoo Ads, just to name a few. The idea behind
PPC is a simple one, advertisers are only charged by networks when their paid ads running are
clicked on and prospects are directed to the web pages or landing page offers. Depending on
the type of industry or niche market and advertising networks, PPC prices can vary greatly
from.50 cents to $60.00 or more each time a prospect clicks on a running ad.
In general insurance, loans, mortgages, attorney services are among the highest cost-per-clicks.
Obviously, the most expensive advertising network is Google.com with their AdWords program.
It's a powerful money making machine if used properly. It could also leave you broke if don't
properly understand the platform. As long as you have the budget and the know how, you can
really make a different in your overall conversion and ROI (return on investment).
There are other popular paid advertising methods out there using social medias and their
paid advertising programs again using PPC (pay-per-click) technologies. Networks such as: Facebook
have a huge and also powerful paid advertising program called Facebook Ads with the option
to also use Instagram Ads since they also own that social network. You can also buy paid traffic
with Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, YouTube Ads (AdWords program). Besides that, there are other
social media paid advertising platform such as Snap Chat and Pinterest that are also gaining ground.
The advantage of using paid advertising is the quick entry. The paid traffic is offered
almost immediately once you finalized your advertising campaigns and it's officially approved
by the network. The drawback is that you need a good marketing budget to collect important
data insights, test and fine tune to get satisfying results.
Free Advertising
First, let's get something straight about free traffic and web page positioning in the
search engine result page also known as the acronym (SERP). Google and other search engines
rank web pages and not websites. You can have a web page from your website that appears on
the first page of Google for a particular keyword query while other pages of the same website
are nowhere to be found in the search result pages for the same keyword query.
Google and other search engines will give priority on their respective first page results
based on their algorithm (mathematical equation) which contains many ranking factors. The six
most important ranking factors are as follows:
1. On page optimization, the action of making a web page compatible to search engines
and also human friendly (meta tags, keyword selection, interlinking, etc.)
2. Great relevant content
3. Back links (relevant links from other high authority sites pointing back to your web pages)
4. UX web page design (easy to navigate for a good user experience)
5. Page load speed (the time it takes to load a web page)
6. Responsive design (each page must be compatible to mobile devices)
So the job of a webmaster is to prepare each page of the website using search engines
industry standards best practices. In return, search engines will provide the best possible
match to the users searching for a particular subject. Google thrives to always deliver the
very best of user experience and sets the bar very high for webmasters to provide The "Wow"
factor each time a user lands on a web page following a search engine query.
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