Productive internet advertising is successful internet advertising

PRODUCTIVE INTERNET ADVERTISING IS SUCCESSFUL INTERNET ADVERTISING

Productive internet advertising is successful internet advertising that requires building a strong online reputation back with a strong marketing message

On the internet, anyone can publish anything about you and you will have little recourse. Rip someone off once and they will go straight to a blog or article site and tell the world that you are a website not to be trusted. The downside to this is the fact that, even if you never rip anyone off, you can upset someone and be quite legitimate in your dealings with them, but if they feel they have been wronged they can easily blacken your name.

It takes money and time to build a reputation online and many people will recommend your website if you do a good job. Do a bad job and a hundred times as many people will be only too happy to rubbish your reputation.

OBTAINING ENQUIRIES THROUGH A WEBSITE

If you are selling a service or product that requires contact with the public you need to ensure that you have a high profile call to action button and that your telephone number is highly visible on all pages. You also need to ensure that your address is easily found on your about and contact us pages. You can also provide a mobile phone number if you are often out of the office but ensure you provide a landline number as well as anyone can have a mobile phone and be operating from anywhere in the world.

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Productive internet advertising is successful internet advertising that requires building a strong online reputation back with a strong marketing message. You need to have high profile, eye catching strap lines that grab potential clients' attention, and back this up with clear and concise content explaining what the strap line actually refers to. However, before you rush off to start making alterations to your website remember that you are in business for profit and not just to make money. By this I mean that you should be trying to deal with qualified enquiries rather than have your staff talking to idiots.

Let's assume that you have got all your PR, marketing, advertising and SEO in place and the world and his dog is visiting your website. You could end up dealing with thousands of enquiries and many of them, or worst still most of the enquiries, will be coming in from total timewasters. Your initial delight with having all this activity on your website will disappear as fast as a turd down the toilet when you realise you are actually losing money trying to deal with all these useless enquiries. So what should you do?

Take our main hub site as an example. It is highly visited for a myriad of reasons but we are not always looking for high volume enquiries, we are looking for the real gems. This does not apply to all sections of the site because there are some where we may not actually come into contact with the public. But where we are dealing with people looking to launch a new internet company or seeking help with a website, we have to spend a lot of time conversing with them. In cases like this, we want to be as sure as possible that we are dealing with a high calibre applicant and not some idiot who struggles to get through life let alone launch and run an internet company.

In order to cut as many idiots out of the loop as possible (although some are so stupid they still manage to get through) we put a number of strategies in place to try and ensure we are dealing with high quality enquiries.

There are sections on our website where we openly talk about idiots, time wasters and dreamers taking up our time. We talk about having a sensible business plan in place, having a half reasonable budget to start with, and the fact that a good idea for the internet does not constitute a business. Some people will be offended by some of our text, and others will be put off and nervous about approaching us. This is the intention. We are in fact nice people and easy to deal with, but we do not have the time or patience to deal with many of the clueless idiots that surf the internet. We know that serious business people will read what we have to say and agree with many of our comments, recognise that we are serious players, and be totally confident in approaching us.

However, some idiots are so stupid they don't realise how stupid they are and so some still squeeze through the net. These people are dealt with politely and usually pointed in the right direction, even if it is the door. Success on the internet is not the easy path to wealth and riches, and we talk to many people who have been successful in the real world who have fallen flat on their faces when starting an internet business.

PRODUCTIVE INTERNET ADVERTISING

We also put Google AdSense ads on most of our pages. This serves two purposes: it filters out many of the timewasters, because they tend to be the people who click through to the advertisers' sites and in doing so they earn us a few bob by not wasting our time. We were a little reticent at first to add AdSense to our pages for fear of losing business. In fact, enquiries remained pretty much the same whilst quality went up a couple of notches.

The other way we try and cut out the dross is by putting filters in our enquiry forms. By asking what would appear to be fairly innocuous questions, we can filter out time wasters who do not fit our profile. The system will never be perfect because people will ignore advice or be economic with the truth when completing a form. In fact some people will actually lie even when having a telephone conversation when asked pertinent questions. Stupid to the point of idiocy because when it comes to the internet, most of the information we are asking them to provide is in the public domain and just needs researching.

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You will need to adopt systems to cut time wasters out of the equation as early as possible if you are dealing direct with the public. We ask straight and often blunt questions of a potential client very early on in the conversation. We would suggest you do the same to avoid spending hours preparing quotes only to discover that the client was just gathering information or dreaming.

ADVERTISING MEDIUMS

There are in fact numerous advertising mediums and I will only be touching on them here because they are all covered in depth under specific chapters.

PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING

David has written an excellent chapter on this subject which you need to refer to. PPC is simply a way of ensuring your website gets traffic and can normally be set up within 24 hours. Properly managed it is one of the most effective and cost efficient forms of advertising around. It does what it says on the tin: you pay for every click through to your website from an advert.

This does not mean that every person who clicks through will be a potential client, nor does it mean that everyone who clicks through is going to buy. It does however enable you to manage your advertising spend and monitor the success rates.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Search engine optimisation, as opposed to search engine marketing (many people confuse the two), is a long drawn out process and can prove expensive. However, once done and done properly, the traffic to your website can increase dramatically without you having to pay per click. Long term, it can prove more profitable than PPC. Despite what other SEO companies claim however, it will never drive as much traffic to your site as PPC.

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