Who (besides me) is sick of listening to the news on a daily basis? CNN has become what I now call “Constantly Negative News”.
A plummeting stock market, banks failing, hundreds of billions of dollars being passed around in the hopes of fixing it all. People are understandably worried about the economy, their jobs, their homes and their credit.
Meanwhile, in the past 6 months, my business has grown by about 20%. How is that possible? It’s simple: Marketing on the Internet is very different, and you have to approach it differently.
Advertising
Television and radio are kept alive by the ROI (return on investment) of their sponsors, and the commercial web is no different. The advantage of advertising online is that it’s far more efficient. When a sponsor puts an ad on a television show or radio program, they can only be vaguely certain of who is watching or listening. Sure the networks provide their own research in demographics and how large their audience is, but much of it is guesswork and impossible to know for sure.
Also, results from TV and radio are very difficult to track. How do you know if the person who just bought your widget was motivated to do so by seeing or hearing your commercial? Again, it’s guesswork.
The internet is different. When you place an ad online, you can track exactly how many people saw it, precisely how many people responded (clicked-through) and exactly how much money you earned from it. You can work to refine and improve your ads to improve your ROI as well. It’s vastly superior to TV and radio in that regard.
So when it comes time for companies to tighten their belts, it only makes sense that they will focus on the ad medium that has the best ROI.
What does this mean for you, the guy just trying to be found on the Internet? It means your advertising-driven web sites that use AdWords ads or other mediums will likely remain relatively healthy during hard times, providing you don’t overspend your budget.
When times get slow, the natural tendency is to start slashing costs where ever possible just to stay alive. That is the absolute worst mentality there is when it comes to your ad dollars. Yet, I see people making the worse mistake of their lives in the advertising category, and they start cutting back there too.
My own advertising has increased over the past 6 months, and will continue to increase over the next 6 months. I have been in business for myself through three recessions now, and my experience has shown that “Now is when you have to be ramping up your ad business, or you may not be in business this time next year.”
I will be the first to tell you, if you’re not careful and don’t know what you’re doing, you can spend a fortune with Google AdWords campaigns and still not increase your business all that much.
A Better Option
Raise your hand if you’ve ever done a Pay-per-Click ad campaign, and either spent a ton of money and gotten mediocre results, or spent your monthly budget by the 8th day of the month.
I have stumbled on to (thanks to one of my blog clients) what I honestly believe is going to turn the online advertising world upside down in the coming months. Better than Pay-per-Click because your monthly ad costs are fixed, not skyrocketing beyond what your budget can afford, or worse, your monthly ad budget is totally exhausted by the 8th of the month. Yet, in many cases, I am seeing better placement of ads with far fewer dollars on major search engines, even on Google, with this new ad medium.
I only wish I had known about this advertising resource sooner, it would have saved me a lot of advertising dollars!
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A survey I conducted recently included a question about advertising budgets, and I was not at all surprised to see that most respondents to the survey either didn’t have an ad budget, or the budget they did have was to include less than $5000 for the entire year for all sources of advertising. That’s less than $420 per month, and many said they planned to spend less than that.
What if I told you that you could spend $200 per month and show up on more than 100 search engines for an entire month?
What if I told you that you could spend $100 per month and do the same thing?
Forget all of the software and gadgets that all the marketers are peddling trying to sell you the next best thing to come down the pike to help your PPC campaigns. You won’t need it!
I am still in the testing stages with my own ads, but I can tell you (even before my 30 day testing period is up) that my ROI is going to be phenomenal.
I want to share this ad opportunity with you, but doing so now would be just a tad-bit pre-mature. So stay tuned here, and once I’ve completed my own personal ad testing, I will give you another update.
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Watch for my next post, as I try to explain to you what all the fuss is about with this crazy thing called “Twitter”, and why you might want to take a closer look at that (if you haven’t already).
Until then, have a great weekend!
Ed