Choosing the Right Internet Advertising Tools

Internet Marketing is a daunting endeavour. There are two methods of Internet Marketing, one requires a large financial investment, the other requires a large time investment. Both methods work, the important thing a work at home professional needs to determine is the method that will result in the biggest profit.

Unfortunately, in Internet marketing, money does not define success. A business owner may have $10 000 to invest in their business, but have a product which needs a time investment to succeed. Of course, this person can hire people to write for them, promote their web sites, and build a client base.

Another person may have 40 hours a week, for six months, to build their business, but fail because their product needs a PayPerClick or a banner ad campaign to sell.

The first step in any Internet Marketing campaign needs to be research:

How does the competition sell their product?
What works?
What doesn’t?
What can you improve?
Do you have the resources needed to improve?

Once the business owner picks their products or revenue generating program, and answers the above questions, it is time to determine which method can sell the product properly.


Banners and Buttons

Banner exchanges are good looking. Some are animated, others flat, and some are video based. They are expensive, but look great. Banners work when on a niche web portal or community, but rarely work when spammed across the net like a PayPerClick AdSense ad.

A portal website is created to attract visitors and send them to the product owner’s web site. They sell social and image generating products. They successfully sell dating products, and cell phones, but may not be the best method of selling a plastic surgeon’s clinic, or books.


Email Advertising

This method of advertising is rarely successful. The average open-rate is less than .01%, with the buy rate being 1% of that number. This means that a million emails need to be sent out to generate 1 – 100 sales.

People are tired of emails. At first they worked if the web owner had something to give away free, but so many sites are tricking people, and so many emails have viruses attached, that few people open spam emails.


Pay Per Click Text Ads

The success rate depends on the web site the ad appears on. The Pay Per Click campaign needs to measure the cost per click through, not the cost per click, when determining whether a campaign is successful.

AdWords is Google's click-advertising program. Each search engine has their own PPC advertising program. Each are successful when used with the right product. Many Content Management Systems, full of pre-selling articles, can generate good results with most products. The trick is to have a product that is widely promoted.

There are thousands of communities built around music, small business success, medical issues, and online shopping. Any product that will appeal to these people, and can blend into the side of a website like it is part of the site, will sell well.

The second aspect is important. Google Ads work best when the Text banner appears to be a part of the website.

Sponsored Search Engine Advertising

This is a type of text PPC advertising that limits the exposure to the top of the search engine searches. The cost can be as high as $25 to have an ad appear at the very top of the search, in a highlighted box, but the click through rate is much higher than the same ad will generate from appearing on the side of a web page article.

Podcasting and Video Streaming

Internet radio, audio/video streaming have introduced a new medium to Internet advertising. Many product selling sites offer tutorials and sales pitches through audio and video streaming. These tools do not require a high level of skill, or more tools than most product owners currently have on their home PC, and their digital camera.

Newsletters & Mailing Lists

Attracting readers to web sites is half of the Internet Marketing battle. A portal that does not generate a mailing list is a waste of time and advertising money. Advertising in the newsletter is a great way to reach a target audience who is prepared to buy. These people subscribe to newsletters, and actually read the articles and ads.














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Google and Duplicate Content

Many of you who follow my 'attempt to take over the world' as a friend recently dubbed my major promotional network will be confused by one thing:
I have duplicate content, but I rank high - how?

To understand this, you first need to realize what Google considers duplicate content.

Exhibit A

If you buy a website of Ebay that is designed to earn AdSense income, and is a mirror of another site - you will be banned.

Exhibit B

If you use mambo, joombala, wordpress, b2evolution, etc., then when Google looks at your site, it sees duplicate content - because it reads code, not content.

You can look on your web site, and 200 others, and the first 200 characters are identical. In many cases, crawlers rarely go beyond 200 - 500 characters . If everything is identical to other sites, the crawlers leave 'before reaching the article.'

(but gracepub, you use B2Evolution. Yes, I do, and I also have a great programmer, Mark, who changes the names of my images, changes strings of PHP code, and does all sorts of other things so that my b2evolution skins/code is not exactly like yours)

Exhibit C

"This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in "regular" and "printer" versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a no-index meta tag, we'll choose one version to list.

This is from Google's site. Translated, it means that Google doesn't ban content - it just only lists one. That is how I get away with it. My sites are all 'equally important' so that I really don't care if Google lists site A, or site B.
I believe that this is my 'saving grace.' Google finds good content at all my sites.
I also use 'no follow' robots to keep Google off pages that are from free content sites.

What To Do?

The first thing you should do is put the original version on your website. Leave it alone for six months. That means that Google will recognize your version as the 'original' and 'not list' the other versions.

After six months, put the article on your blog, in a free content site, etc. YOU are not the one using the duplicate content, THEY are.

If someone syndicates your blog, takes your articles, etc., it is 'their' site that is not indexed.

Or, if you want, just change the wording in the title, and some of the words in the article before adding your work to a free content site.
I hope this lowers the panic level for some web managers and freelance writers.

Put Internet Marketing Into Perspective

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
C.S. Lewis

There is a fundamental questions many 'work at home' and 'Internet marketers' need to ask themselves:

What should I do and what will make me the most money?

Do I try something that promises to pay big, or do I do something that pays small?
Do I count my money by the item, word, click or by the hour?

-The answer is, there is no answer.
-Everything on the Internet is a scam.
-Nothing on the Internet is a scam.
-One wo/man's scam is another wo/man's cash cow.

I was talking to one person yesterday who quit a program after six months because she said there was no money in it. I asked her how much time she invested in the project. After fifteen-minutes of discussion we concluded that, in six months, she had only invested 50 - 60 hours. So, what failed? The program, or her?

I could buy a McDonald's franchise, give it to this woman, and she would still fail. Not because McDonalds is a scam, but because she doesn't 'get it.'

If you want to succeed, you need to do the work. Yes, there may be some 'get rich quick' schemes that work - but there are a few millionaires ahead of you making more millions.

C.S.Lewis summed it up nicely. If you do not have the aptitude, training, or time to invest in making money online, you won't make money.

Yes, I've tried some things that have busted and forced me to go back and find the right road. I wasted a couple of years before I learned that I had to invest time each week learning how to make money and make the Internet work for me.

I tried two or three things before I found what would work for me.