Marketing & Advertising
Every website needs to be marketed and advertised effectively in order to receive customers, maintain customers and gain sales.There are many online channels to Market and Advertise your website. This can leave you 'swept up' in the idea of going to most of them, thinking it is a good idea to advertise everywhere to 'get the word out'. (Starting out this is what we did).
This is not the smartest approach for 2 reasons!
• Very time consuming and some, if not most of your marketing and advertising channels will not converse well due to the nature of your site and the channel your using.
As well as writing different ads each channel can take an awful long time to set up.
• Costly! You do not need to pay for advertising 'everywhere' or start spamming the web with your 'amazing site'. And paying for different channels to say the same thing to the same audience.
When we first started out years ago, we used as many free advertising sites as possible as we had little or no money. After all, that's the smartest idea right? If you have no money then it makes sense?
This is true to an extent.
Some free advertising and marketing sites can help you bring a small audience, but if you want conversion (to turn your visitors into sales) then it doesn't matter about how many people come to your site or from which channel.
After 6 years of trial and error, the lesson learnt is that the most important thing about bringing in revenue from your site is within the content of your site.
Ask yourself, how many times have you visited a site, scanned around for around 5 -10 seconds and not found what you need, so clicked off and go else where?
The most important thing, when setting up your marketing and advertising campaign is to know who to target for your specific site.
Your website will be packed full of useful, important content. Somewhere online, there are people searching for the content you have to offer. If you target these customers you are bringing in an audience that is looking for you! This makes more sense than advertising your site everywhere, because everywhere does not mean everyone wants or needs what you have to offer.
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When writing your marketing or adverts, do not over write.
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If picked well, you can get all the audience you need from both channels if your content is useful and your advert is relevant to your content.
A few free marketing and advertising channels that are popular and useful include
Create a business page through Facebook. Engaging with your audience on a regular basis is key to advertising. As of 2016, Facebook has 1.71 billion users a month! I'll say that again. "Facebook has 1.71 billion users a month". We're on Facebook I'm sure you are too! If not get on it! There are people interested in what you have to offer, say or sell and updating your page regularly and sharing with your readers is how you gain new ones and keep the old interested.
How to set up a Facebook page is coming soon. Sign up to our newsletter to receive tips on how to make
Another free useful tool to have for your business. Twitter is social networking and micro blogging site and as of 2016 serviced averaged at 313 million users a month!
Twitter is very simply to use because you are just posting short messages (tweets), with a picture or link if you choose.
It's relatively simple to set up following the instructions and be sure to keep the app on your phone so you can tweet at any time engaging with your customers.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing app that has been made specifically for the phone. Meaning, if you use your tablet it will be a slightly larger version then the phone app and will not fit the screen entirely.Instagram users use this app as a way of telling a story through pictures and videos. A great function of Instagram is that you can configure it to auto post on:
• Flickr
• Foursquare
Instagram works directly with your camera. They have made it super easy to snap a photo, edit, add filters or retouch and post within a few minutes.As of 2016 Instagram has 500 million users a month.
Paid Adverts
Google
Google is the largest advertising network online and attracts over 1.17 billion users (292 million for Yahoo and 267 million for Bing).
Paid advertising can be beneficial, but it is not mandatory when just starting out.
For Google, Yahoo and Bing the set up for an advert is relatively similar.
After signing up to Google Adwords you have to create a campaign. This campaign / advert has the basis of a title, middle section and link.
There are different types of campaigns and we will talk more about that later (sign up to our newsletter to be the first to know about more money making ideas).
The main thing with this type of paid advert is the payment. You are charged per keyword click.
A keyword is what people type into the search bar to find something. For example if you have a silver jewellery site then your keywords might include; silver jewellery, silver bangles, silver necklaces, buy silver jewellery etc.
Each keyword cost a certain amount per click. This can tally up if your visitors from the paid advert are not converting into sales.
We will discuss this in more detail later.
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Get to the point
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Be catchy (you have about 2 seconds for a customer to see you advert, read it and decided whether they want to click it or move on. So you need to hold their attention with useful content on your site.