4Squared Media

PPC: Pay per click marketing is a method by which you pay for clicks.  I know that sounds simple, but if you’ve never done it then it can be daunting to figure out.  Anyone can setup a pay per click campaign to market their products.  The major search engines and social networking sites all provide a way to implement a pay per click campaign on their sites.  When creating pay per click campaigns use caution.  Make sure you set your budget at a reasonable level.  You can choose a daily budget for your campaign.  Understand that clicks have a different price depending on what keywords you are targeting.  Some keywords will cost you 0.25 per click where others will cost $25.00 per click.  Next time you are on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.  Take a look at the sponsored ads sections.  Then tend to be at the very top of the page and along the right hand column.  The top spots are worth more and ads are shown based on what keywords you have just searched for.  The much more to say about this, but this is enough to give you an idea.

CPA:  Cost per action campaigns are usually implemented by advertising networks like Commission Junction or ClickBank.  There are many networks that will execute CPA campaigns for you.  So what is this?  Cost per action campaigns allow you to pay when a desired action is completed.  Suppose you want to sell your book online.  You can create a website, submit the site to an advertising network and only pay the network when a book actually sells.  These are usually more expensive per action then a click campaign, but you also only pay for actual sales or leads.  So the other option for CPA campaigns is using them to generate leads.  Let’s say you are a realtor who would like generate an interest list for a specific property using the internet.  You can have a web development company create a lead generation site for you and pay only when a person actually fills out the interest form in reference to the property.  Leads may cost you any where from $3.00 per lead up to $30 per lead.  It really just depends on the product you are generating leads for.  When using CPA marketing beware of fraud.  CPAwatchdog.com is a company that helps to fight CPA fraud.

CPM: These are cost per impression campaigns.  With this sort of advertising you can place your ad on a website and pay to have it shown a pre-determined amount of times.  So let’s say you want to buy 100 impressions on a website.  You would pay a fixed dollar amount to have your ad shown on that site 100 times.  Usually sites that have this option will rotate your ad through the system with other ads so it won’t all be spent in the first 5 minutes that the ad is up on the site.

SEO:  Search Engine optimization is not really a direct advertising technique.  It actually is more of a long term solution to getting your site to consistently show up in the search engines.  The reality is that internet users spend less then 5% of their time on search engines so SEO is important, but will only get you so far.  SEO is really about making sure that you site content is relevant to what you expect you customers will be searching for.  In addition to achieve higher rankings in the search engine you want to make sure you have back links to your site.  A back link is when another site links to your site.  This adds to your ranking score because the more others link to you, the more likely it is that you have content that others truly value.  Technically it is free to optimize you site if you have the skills to do so.  If not it is possible to hire companies like 4squared media to optimize your site for you.  When hiring a company to perform SEO service for you be sure that they are providing reports for you.  These reports will be the proof to show that the SEO techniques implemented by said company are actually working.

In summary there are many ways to advertise you site online.  Ideally you want to implement a variety of online advertising techniques to drive traffic to your website.  As you drive traffic to your site make sure that you are tracking the effectiveness of the advertising and eliminate or refine those that are not performing as expected.

Written by Isaac Martinez of 4squared Media an Internet Marketing and Web Development company