Web Advertising Tutorial

In the good old days web advertising meant banners. Many of the larger web sites would offer CPM (cost per thousand displays) banner placement. In todays day and age this is generally not the most effective advertising for smaller web sites, such as the one you will be creating. No, your advertising budget is likely to be tiny, your brand will be nonexistent, and you may be advertising a product or service that most people aren't even familiar with.

There are basically two types of web advertising practices that you will need to consider. One of them can be considered guerilla advertising. The other will be paid placement for search engine results. Books have been written about both of these topics, but I'll give you a short introduction to each as well as some tips and tricks.

Guerilla Advertising
One of the best ways to illustrate this is to give an example. Find an active online forum related to your web projects in some way. Create an account and become an active participant in that forum. Put a link to one of your related web sites in every post as your signature -- assuming it is allowed. A forum can be read by thousands and will almost certainly be indexed by major search engines.

If your product or service is of a more local nature, be sure to mention your web site on all of your paperwork. Then, offload as much of your customer service costs as you can, by providing detailed information online. You may be able to get customers from your competitors if they come to your web site for product details. You may also be able to save on regular advertising by making your web site known and referring to promotions on it which may allow reduced or less expensive media purchases.

Other areas to promote, in appropriate ways, may be Internet newsgroups, press releases, classified ads and so on. The trick is to find free or very cheap ways to get your web site, product or service in front of people. There are a million ways to do this, I highly recommend the book, Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson, available from Amazon. I own a copy myself.

Search Engine Placement
When the Internet was newer, search engine placement was all about optimizing your site to rank well in the major search engines. Of course, the people who designed search engines worked against this so that they could attempt to judge the quality of sites and rank the highest quality first. While you should still design your pages with appropriate titles and keyword usage, there is realistically no longer any hope in achieving a top placement without paying fees.

Overture was the first mainstream pay for placement search engine. It's bold new paradigm changed the face of the Internet with respect to advertising. Now, the game is all about knowing how much you can pay for each visitor while still maintaining an appropriate profit. Once you know this, you can use a service, such as Google Adwords, to bid on search terms and have your advertisement displayed to prospective buyers.

This is an excellent marriage between search engines and advertising, in that you know and control your prices, you are ensured that virtually every visitor is qualified based on the search term and the writeup you have displayed that induced them click, and unfortunately that the cost of search terms is controlled by market forces.

One way to help control search term prices is to use niche search engines or to use phrases that are not as common. You can even bid on common spelling errors of larger search phrases using multiple words. Through tricks such as this you may reduce the number of competitors bidding against you and decrease the price you pay per visitor to you site.

In your search for more visitors to your site you will come across offers that seem too good to be true. You can certainly give this offers a try, but start out with very small investments. There are some unscrupulous operators that will sell you unique visitors, but they won't tell you what this really means.

While it is NOT always the case it is possible that your unique visitor will in fact be a pop-up or pop-under web browser which opens without your supposed visitor ever deciding to visit your site. You can be sure that this traffic will generally ignore your site, as the offending popped up materials will be promptly closed.

Another way the bulk traffic is generated is buy buying up expired domains that still receive traffic. For example, if you owned the domain niftyname.com [*], and then let it expire, anyone linking to your site would continue to send traffic to there. People purchase these expired domains and then sell the traffic -- which again results in people visiting your site that probably aren't all that interested in what you are offering to them.

However, this does provide another idea for guerilla advertising. Buy up expired domains if they had content that indicates visitors would also be interested in your products or services. Anyway, at least read the description for the various sponsored links, they should start to make more sense after reading the material above.

* I happen to own the domain niftyname.com, which I'm not using as of yet!