you are here: Homepage > Online Advertising >        Advertising: How We Can Help You.... Advertising Recommendations Report Pay Per Click Set Up & Campaign Management Submission of Website to Hundreds of Directories Reciprocal Link Campaign Management Content Exchange to Enhance Your Website Profile Blog and Social Networking, Website Promotion Creation of XML 'Content Feeds' to Promote a Site Contact Us with Your Requirements            Overview of Online Advertising   Introduction - the Global market for online advertising now stands at a staggering $40 billion per year and expected to double to $80 billion dollars per year over the next 10 years.  For webmasters, the various methods of advertising potentially available means instant website visibility and access to thousands of prospects almost instantly.  The key questions a new webmaster should ask are:- How much I spend on advertising? How and where should I best use my budget? How do I calculate the return on investment of any advertising spend?  Unlike hugely expensive TV advertising, online advertising can provide a lower cost alternative.  Webmasters can compete in niche sectors with large competitors.  The following provides an overview of the main types of online advertising available...   Pay Per Click - pay per click advertising is the fastest method of paying to advertise products and services online.  It works by displaying textual adverts next to or normal search engine results.  The user to a search engine is not always aware that a search engine result may be a pay per click advert (associated with the search term they entered into the search engine in the first place).   Pay Per Click Advertisers can bid for any 'search term', in a never ending auction system set up by the worlds leading search engines (like Google's Adwords system) and other pay per click networks.    Pay Per Click Advertising represents the bulk of Global advertising spending online as it  has been accepted by users who can easily finding the specific product, service or company based on a simple search engine query.  Pay per click is a form of contextual advertising where the textual advert is displayed in context with the content it is automatically placed on.   Contextual pay per click adverts are also being inserted as appropriate keywords and phrases naturally intermingled amongst webmasters content.   Banner Advertising - less popular than pay per click, the traditional banner advert consists of a rectangular gif or jpg image, usually placed at the top of a webpage.  Typically, the banner is designed to be eye catching, with a headline, sometimes using multimedia technology such as Adobe Flash, to makes the advert appear to move.  Users have become annoyed with 'in your face' banner ads that do not always relate to the content of the page they are visiting.  As a result, the click through rates have lowered consistently over the last 10 years resulting in very poor return on investment for advertisers.  In the 1990's, banner ad swap networks sprung up to boost exposure for advertisers.  In addition, banner adverts started charging advertiser on a pay per impression basis.  Every time a webpage is load an 'impression' is counted against that banner being displayed.  Unfortunately, irrelevant search bot 'hits', misleading statistical feedback and user fraud resulted in artificially inflated impressions and cost - all helping to give banner ads a bad name.  Banner adverts have more recently evolved into varying sizes and methods.. unwanted pop-up's adverts and floating banner adverts have also become hated by surfers. Most of these have resulted from spyware and adware infections from emails or malicious scripts picked up by unaware users.   Paid Directory Listings - hundreds of directories of websites have been established providing every type of vertical industry collection of web sites. A directory is website constructed around the webmaster submissions categorized hierarchically and managed by editors. The largest of directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Business Directory provide a huge variety categories to help users 'drill down' and find what they want quickly and simply. There are hundreds of paid online directories available whereby you can submit your site for a charge. The benefits of advertising in such a directory (compared to a free directory) is that it is more likely to have a better qualified prospect who have made click through to your site. There are also many niche directories, specialising in specific industry sectors, with articles and product reviews for niche areas.  Beware that most smaller directories have only really been designed to facilitate the purchase of inbound links by webmasters, (and not useful in driving real people through the directory to your website).   If you know your average conversion rate per site visitor, you can then decide whether or not the directory inclusion charge will create a return on investment. It most cases it does not or its extremely difficult to quantify. Some of the internets leading directories are:- Business.com Dir.yahoo.com Botw.org Dirfly.com Dirjournal.com Stpt.com Joeant.com Incrawler.com Webworldindex.com    Free Directory Listings - There are literally hundreds of directories on the Internet where you can submit your site to. Most of these directories provided have little qualified traffic back to your website. If you planned to advertise in such a directory be very careful that you are not linking back to what Google calls a 'bad neighbourhood'. Most free directories require a reciprocal link as a condition of the inclusion. Some simple qualification criteria are as follows:- Does the directory have a page rank? (look in your Google toolbar. If the site does not and it has not even be a cached in a search engine, do not submit your site to it on the basis of a reciprocal link from your site. Does the site allow automatic inclusion of submissions or is there a delay following submission so that have a human editor must approve your submission? Only submit your site to directories where manual approval takes place. Do not consider first submission to be a form of inbound of link generation.... only look at the site in terms of its advertising potential... For instance, is it vertically aligned to the industry you are in? If so, it is more likely to attract the profile of your target audience. Conversely, general business directories usually are split into many 'off topic' categories, (up along the lines of the yahoo business directory) and will not provide a niche advertising platform to promote your site. But it's free so surely I have nothing to lose by submitting my site to it? Wrong... By innocently submitting your site to a free directory that has already been banned by search engine (while providing a reciprocal link back at the same time), you risk being penalised for linking to a 'bad neighbourhood'. Advertising in a Blog or Forum - this is a great way of to attract your target audience to your site. Do not post your web address in any blog or forum related to anything; make sure the topics discussed match very closely with the key phrases and topics on your site. When ever you post make sure that your posting a unique and well thought through article, or responding to somebody's question in an intelligent and comprehensive fashion. In other words, readers of the forum or blog will be impressed by your advice and are more likely to click through to your site.   back to top Copyright IntelligentMarketing.org.uk 2008