Who Needs a Web Site?
Any one who owns or plans to start a business should consider having a web site designed. The main benefit to starting your own web site are that your web site will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your web site can server as a representative that answers questions about your business, offer customer service even when your business is closed at night and on weekends and holidays and to sell your products and services.
A web site is a very powerful and inexpensive marketing and advertising tool and a great way to expand your business into other areas of the state or country.
Thorington Creative creates unique web sites which help you reach the goals that you have for creating an online presence.
Thorington Creative specializes in unique, high quality professional web site design for businesses. Thorington Creative has over 12 years of diverse business and computing experience in web site development and print.
Thorington Creative strives to create professional designs that will effectively promote your products or services to your target audience and generate sales for your bottom line. One of our goals is to make your advertising experience pleasant, easy, affordable, and enjoyable.
The Power of Search Engine Marketing
So how does search marketing work? Well, each time someone uses a search engine they enter a keyword or keyphrase into the given search box. After they submit their words or phrases, the search engine returns two lists of results. There are the natural results... And the paid results (which are, essentially, ads).
If the person performing the search believes that the results relate to what they're looking for, they'll click on one or more of the links displayed. Obviously, as an Internet marketer, you'll want your organic result or ad to appear to, and be clicked on, by your prospects. Typically, the higher the appearance of your listing in the search engine results pages or the greater the number of prospects who will click on your listing and visit your page.
It's important to note that the search engines don't rank websites as a whole; they rank specific webpages. In any case, the higher that your webpages appear in the SERPs, the more people who are likely to see your description and click on your link. However, SEM experts tend to vary in their view on whether it's better to have the top position in both or either the free and paid results. While most believe that having the top rank in the free results attracts the most clicks and traffic; some SEM experts believe that it's more cost-effective to have the second, third or lower listing in the paid results. Nevertheless, most agree that you want your free and/or paid results to be on the first page.
As indicated, search engine marketing can be divided into two main types: search engine optimization and paid advertising (both pay-per-click advertising and pay-per-impression advertising both of which involve some similar, and some very different, strategies for getting cost-effective results. Search engine optimization or involves taking specific steps to get the search engines to rank your website as highly as possible in the organic SERPs. Many believe SEO to be both an art and a science. It's a science because the search engines use mathematical algorithms to work out where to rank various websites... it's an art because the search engines keep those algorithms hidden from public knowledge, which means that any approach has an element of art to it.
Getting a high place in the paid results is not so mysterious, nor time consuming. However, you still need the smarts to work out which keywords to bid on, to prepare ads that generate qualified clicks, and have a landing page that converts those clicks into sales. There are two types of paid advertising too - pay-per-click (PPC) where your advertising cost is based on the price you pay per click - and an impression basis, where your cost is based on how many impressions your ad receives.
While it can take some time to achieve high rankings in the free results, you CAN have your ad appearing in the top position on the first page of the SERPs for a given keyword or phrase... IF you're willing to pay the price!
So there you have a quick run-down of search engine marketing. It's definitely worth delving into further if you like the idea of building a consistent traffic stream to your web business.
Online Marketing Basics
Online advertising offers advertisers, both online and offline, an opportunity to reach very specific niche audiences and target markets that wasn’t previously possible outside of perhaps the niche and trade magazine market. The biggest difference between niche online advertising and niche print advertising is often cost. Online advertising options are often more affordable, and with new niche websites launched every day, online advertising opportunities are almost endless.
There are many different types of online advertising, from blatant advertising to subtle, seemingly natural links. Here are several common types of online advertising currently used:
1. Banner Advertising – Banner ads are image ads with a company’s or website’s logo, slogan, and advertising message (or something similar) included. Banner ads come in many different sizes, which would be determined by the space available on the publisher’s site where the advertising space is being purchased. Some banner ads are animated.
2. Sponsorships – Advertisers regularly gain exposure in online sponsorships, whether that’s sponsoring a site blatantly for a site-wide text link or banner ad, sponsoring online videos (or even limited commercial sponsorships with major TV networks offering videos online), or sponsoring something such as a free Web template, where the sponsorship link stays in tact every time a template is used.
3. Text Link Advertising – Text link ads can work similarly to banner ads, they can be site-wide links in the sidebar, footer, or other area of a publisher’s website, or they can be a text link worked into the content on one particular page on a publisher’s site.
4. Video Advertising – Video advertising can be done similarly to banner advertising using various video screen sizes, or can involve blatant advertising in essentially Web commercials released with some kind of entertainment value to video sharing sites, hoping for a viral effect of the video being shared to increase exposure.
5. Email Advertising – Email advertising is essentially purchasing banner or text link ad space within email newsletters reaching a certain target market.
6. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising / Search Engine Advertising – Pay-per-click advertisements can be purchased in text or image / banner formats, often through search engine advertising (to place in sponsored results for certain keyword phrases) or through ad publisher networks such as Google Adsense, where ads appear on publisher sites relevant to chosen advertiser keywords.
7. Online Classifieds – Online classifieds advertising works much in the same way as offline classifieds, where products, jobs, and more can be advertised to a more general market.
8. Pop-up / Pop-under Advertising – These are online ads that open a new window on a browser’s computer screen when they enter or leave a Web page or click on something. They’re often considered intrusive, and blocked automatically using pop-up blockers by many users.