New to Website Advertising

[jgisler]

Hi,

I am new to advertising websites, in fact this wonderful task was just bestowed upon me last week. I do have 1 site that will actually have a advertising budget that I can use. Does anyone have any suggestion on how to go about this? Should I use a service? Should I do it myself? What kind of expectations should I have?

Thanks,
Jen :)

[tfanelli]

Dear Jen,

If you want immediate traffic invest in pay per click (Overture or Google Adwords). Traditional search optimization is a long term slow process where pay for performance is the shot in the arm to get the site going. If you have an ecommerce site or a site that you need to make money from then invest in getting started in either Overture or Google's pay per click programs. There are some great forums here on both of those issues. While that is getting started you should read as much about traditional site optimization from these forums as possible. Start implementing what you are learning and over time you will increase your non paid listings in the engines. In the end the best program is using both methods, paid and free listings.

[Jack_Frost]

This is a very tough question. Overture is guaranteed to drive traffic, but depending on the bid cost, quality of your site (conversion ratios it can achieve), and lots of other factors, it may not work too well.

That being said, I often start new clients with small Overture or Adwords programs to get their feet wet and then work from there. My thought usually is that if PPC does not work well, then why would optimization. My hope is that PPC will work well and then we use this data to create the organic optimization program.

[jackc]

Hi,

I agree that the bidding price can be quite expensive for big search engines. You can try the small search engines, [supertop100.com...] . The price is a lot cheaper for small search engines.

You can also try Popunder/Popin Ads. They must increase your traffic. The advertisement is graphical, so it should be very effective as well.

Jackc

[edited by: agerhart at 5:55 pm (utc) on Feb. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] nice try :) [/edit]

[eWhisper]

Does anyone have any suggestion on how to go about this? Should I use a service? Should I do it myself? What kind of expectations should I have?

This is a recent thread about using a mangement company for PPC: [webmasterworld.com...] that goes into expectations and some of why or why not to use.

[eWhisper]

jackc, you might want to read the TOS [webmasterworld.com].

Promotional URLs and referral ids aren't necessary.

[cyanweb]

Even with all the Pay Per Click hype and SEO techniques don't overlook the importance of simply being listed where your target market is - look for Niche Portals and quality local directories. You would be surprised at how much traffic you can get for $50 from some good directories / portals / link listings...

The others are right though - no matter how much money you have to spend on marketing - if your site isn't built right - it won't make a difference.

I know someone who was getting 2000 visitors / month with only 1 sale... they were spending BIG on print / online advertising... one look at his site and I told him - "get it rebuilt from scratch and get it done properly"... if you're site doesn't sell to at least 1 in 50-100 targeted visitors it's practically "dead site" (depends on industry as always)

[Net_Guy]

My suggestion, as some others also pointed out, is to first identify the popular search engines for your industry. Techy oriented content/industry is what Google is high at, while retail stuff for individuals is mostly better at Overture.

This said, review your site's content and 'optimize' it for the keywords that you are hitting at.

A