The internet has become an essential vehicle for creative advertising. It opens the door for you to stand out as unique as you want and attract your target audience at a very low cost compared with traditional marketing. Even though you might reach more people quicker through television and radio, you have a better chance at making a return on investment with online content marketing due to its low cost verses the high cost of traditional mass media advertising. The biggest difference is that traditional marketing tends to be interruptive while content marketing avoids “commercial interruption” and sticks with the content people are searching for. The key is crafting a message creative enough to cut through online clutter.
Why SEO Rules
The reason search engine optimization has become such a huge fascination with web marketers is that it’s the key to bringing any website a huge percentage of its traffic. If you ignore SEO there’s a good chance your message will not be communicated with many followers. It takes long enough for a new website to get indexed by search engines, but after several months of crafting original, useful content, it will start to pay off. Search engines set algorithms to help weed out what they consider to be low quality websites. (Many factors affect the quality score of a webste.) Ultimately, search engines want to skip the clutter and give high rankings to sites with the richest and most relevant content.
Google has the most influence on the development of SEO since it’s by far the most widely used search engine. Learning their guidelines has become synonymous with conforming to “white hat SEO.” Sites that try to trick search engines are said to be using “black hat SEO,” which is punishable by getting banned from search rankings. That’s why you must be careful about your creative advertising techniques. As long as you are not creating web spam, such as over-use of keywords and duplicate content, and focusing on creating original quality content, then you are in the running to get high search rankings for your niche. You need to craft relevant web content that no other competitor is doing so that you get the credit for your unique keyword phrases. Google+ activity can also help your search rankings.
Pay Per Click
One of the ways Google revolutionized online advertising was with a pay per click (PPC) platform called AdWords. It is the core way that the tech giant makes its billions of dollars. It’s a form of creative advertising based on keywords that you select so that when Google users search for those terms your site appears at the top of the search results page. Using Google’s Keyword Planner, which has replaced Keyword Tool, you can find out your “cost per click”(CPC) for any keyword. The keywords that reflect specific industries usually cost more than non-commercial keywords. You only have to pay the CPC when someone clicks your ad, which tends to be from curious potential customers since most online surfers avoid clicking ads.
As long as you choose appropriate keywords, if there is demand for your business it should bring targeted traffic to your site. AdWords is a fast way to generate new leads and it has been proven to help small and medium business, as well as big companies. Traditional media, by comparison, tends to be more useful to big companies who can afford the high cost of running repetitious mass media advertising. If you have more of a content site than a product site, you can earn money from Google’s AdSense platform by running ads of other marketers on your site.
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