Advertise your Website
Expect to get more visitors when you ADVERTISE your website
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How to Advertise your Website
Buy website advertising
Advertising is a very ancient art. Older advertising media like magazines, newspapers, billboards, radio and TV are all still available to advertise your website, but they are mainly useful for websites associated with local businesses.
If your website promotes a local business such as a shop, hotel, restaurant or practice, these older media can work very well.
For websites that are not promoting a local business, the most appropriate medium in which to advertise your website may be the web itself.
Why advertise your website?
When should you use advertising to attract people to your website?
Whenever it pays.
Lets take an example. Suppose you knew that for every 100 visitors to your site you would earn a profit of $50 through website sales. If the cost of advertising to attract 100 visitors is $40, then you can gain a clear $10 profit for every $40 you spend on advertising your website.
But if the cost of the advertising to attract 100 visitors was $100, you would make a loss of $60 for every $100 you spend.
Of course you will want to factor in your expectation for repeat business.
But if the immediate outcome of the advertising spend is going to be a loss to your business, then maybe you would choose to promote your business some other way.
In practice, you usually don't know before you start, how well advertising will work for you. So you try it out, with a limited advertising budget. In fact you may have to make several tries, because there are always many variables to experiment with, including the exact format of your advertisement. Small changes here can make a big difference to click-through rates
How to advertise your website for free
One sure way of getting the sums to work out in your favour is to pay nothing for website advertising. That's right. Like so many other services and products available on the web, you can advertise your website for free.
There are many online classified advertising directories which offer a free listing. Some directories do this because they hope to persuade you to pay for your next listing. (Paid listings are more prominently displayed, so they may bring more traffic. to your website.)
A free listing might sound like the perfect answer to your website advertising needs, but don't expect huge traffic inflows from one free ad. Sometimes a free listing opens the door to a flood of emails from the classified directory concerned, selling the merits of their paid listings.
Swap Ads with another website
You can try to obtain advertising space in another website, in the same field as yours (or a complimentary one). One of the ways this can work is if you are willing to host their advertisement on your website in exchange.
If your website (call it A) displays an advertisement for website B, and website B displays your advertisement, perhaps you can send him 50 visitors - and he sends you 50 visitors.
Does this benefit either of you? Yes, because the 50 visitors you give away to website B have already seen your website, so they are probably no loss to you. If they had been going to buy from you, they would have already have done so. The same argument applies from website B's viewpoint.
In fact, this is just a special case of exchanging links, which we dealt with in our Website Links tutorial. The links may be a bit fancier and more prominently displayed. You want to try to exchange advertisements with a leading website in your field, if you can.
Paid Advertising
Another approach, involving another website in the same or complementary field, is to ask the owner of the other website (or it could be a blog) if he would host your ad for a monthly fee (or perhaps on a pay per click basis).
Yet another way to reach a target audience with a paid advertisement is to look for a suitable newsletter or mailing list related to your area of business. Most mailing lists will sell advertising space. This method has the advantage that you know how many people will see your advertisement, so you can calculate the response rate (if you are tracking responses).
Advertising through a Traffic Exchange
Traffic Exchanges provide another free means of acquiring visitors to your site. This is how they work: you earn credits by visiting other members' websites which are advertised in the traffic exchange. To repay the favour, they follow your ads to visit your website - which uses up your credits.
Once your credits are all used up, you have to earn more (you can also buy them) before you can place more advertisements and get more visits.
You may also earn credits by signing up new members (into your downline). Whenever those downline members are active on the traffic exchange, they earn credits for you, as well as for themselves.
One problem with traffic exchanges is that the people who visit your website may not really be interested in it - they may be just trying to earn credits. Nevertheless, it is a fairly useful and predictable way of attracting traffic to a website, especially a young one.
One of the oldest and best-known traffic exchanges is Traffic Swarm.
Advertisement Tracking (Response Tracking)
To track responses, you have to identify which visitors to your site came from a particular advertisement. One method is a tracking code.
The simplest approach is to append ?xxxx to your web page URL in the advertisement. The question mark is ignored by the browser (as are the subsequent characters). Use a unique code number or letters for each advertisment in place of xxxx above. Your statistics program should count visitors to that coded URL, as though it were a separate page.
The main limitation to the usefulness of this method is that you can't track the further movement of your visitor through your website, so you don't know if he actually bought from you. You can't calculate the "conversion rate."
You can also use a tracking script or an advertisement tracking service to track responses to your web advertisements. Some ad tracking services used to be free, but I couldn't find any free ones when researching this article.
Using a Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising network
The most common way of advertising on the web is to use one of the many PPC advertising networks (including Google and Yahoo) that will place (or "serve") your advertisements either on search engine results pages ("Search") or on other websites ("Content").
If the advertising network is a search engine, they generally serve advertisements according to the search phrase selected by the web surfer. (As the advertiser, you have already told the advertising service what keywords you are interested in.)
If the advertising service is not a search engine, they still match your advertisement to a suitable website. And if they don't do such a good job of matching, your advertisement won't get so many clicks. (You only pay for the visitors you actually get.)
This tutorial is only an overview of your advertising options, but I hope it's been enough to give you some ideas.
Our next tutorial deals with creating a mailing list to promote your website...
Links / Resources
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who click on your ad, once they see it.
Free Classified Ad directories:
Craigslist
INet Giant
Best Way Classifieds
Free Classified Ads
List of free web advertisers:
The best free advertising list to use for your website
More articles on website advertising:
How to advertise your website
Website Tips
How to advertise your web site
Online Advertising
Does Free Advertising Work?
Ad Tracking Software:
Ad Track Pro
How to install an ad tracking script (video instruction)
Set up your own Ad-tracking links
Conversion rate: The percentage of ad-responders who actually go on to buy something from you.
Ad-Tracking Services:
Adminder
hyperTracker
Ad-Tracking articles:
How to track your online ad response
PPC Advertising Network:
BidVertiser
More articles on PPC Advertising:
9 Steps to improving your PPC results
E-Commerce Best Practices - Pay-Per-Click
The Best Secrets of Google PPC: Content or Search?
Top 12 tips to writing effective Google Adwords Ads
Google Adwords Mistakes to Avoid
Google Adwords - Top 12 Benefits
Google Adwords disadvantages
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Copyright © 2009 / 2010 EasyWebsitePrimer.com Last updated: September 2010
Consider the free website advertising options before paying to advertise your website