Never Ending Thoughts…

OK, you must be thinking this guy has gone nuts. When everyone is talking about how important it is for any company to spend money on Internet Marketing, he’s telling that there are down sides to that? If you will read on further, you will agree with me, and trust me it won’t take more than two minutes. Yes, two straight minutes.

Currently Internet Marketing is mainly done via either online banner Ad campaigns, or email marketing. And it’s not that it doesn’t work. In fact it works great! Better than any other advertising medium; especially if your product or service is Internet related. And that is one of the biggest downsides of Internet Marketing. So it’s cost effective and works great; So how’s it a downside? You will know if you have run a successful campaign. Having been easily available and much more quickly modifiable, Internet Marketing can sometimes attract more visitors and bring in more customers than you can handle. That would directly impact your service quality and in the end bad customer experience is going to bite you back with negative ratings which are far more harder to fix than any other thing.

So now we know the risk and downside of Internet Marketing. And how do I make sure not to risk my business into this situation? It’s much easy and straight forward. All you do is make some ground rules and follow them. For example, a) Before spending money on Internet Marketing, carefully analyze your market and your product and figure out what kind of customers you’ll be able to serve. And then b) use extremely targeted Internet Marketing methods to reach out to only those potential customers. This will not only help you spend less Internet Marketing Dollars, it will also help you get the customers that you will be able to easily serve and build a good trust within your market.

The analogy of Fire goes very well with Internet Marketing – It’s good as long as it doesn’t spread out of control.

Happy Internet Marketing Folks!

When it comes to online advertising, there are two main schools of thought – people who want to pay for an impression and people who want to pay for a click. While it might sound obvious that you’d always want to pay for a click, but there are situations where paying for even an impression might be justifiable. The reasons for going with one approach or the other are so hard and subjective that even Google provides both the ways of advertising and leaves it up to the user to decide which one to pick for their campaign.

When would Pay Per Click Make Sense?

Although there is no specific formula around what approach to follow, people generally tend to use pay per click when the intention is to grab a sale. The idea here is to be able to find out how much did it cost you to generate a sale. So for example your margin from selling a book is $10 and your aim on marketing is $5 (so that you make at least $5 on the sale), and you know that 1 in 50 people who will visit your site will buy your book (i.e. 50 clicks would result into a sale), your CPC should be 5/50 = $0.10.

When would Pay Per Impression Make Sense?

On the other hand, with pay per impression, your aim is probably just to be visible and leave an impression at the back of the mind of the person who saw your Ad. Or perhaps it’s a blog that you are marketing – from which you don’t really make any money. So tracking by the click might not make much sense because you can’t really relate it to any sale that you’d make. While, personally I believe it’s still a hard argument to make, but the more I deal with various publishers and advertisers the more I find that pay per impression works well in case your aim is really to just to gain more buzz and not much real sales. The reason is also because traditionally “per click” costs are higher than per impression and so when you know that you are not going to make any sales anyways, you’d rather go with per impression model.

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Let’s talk about something that everyone wants from their Internet Marketing efforts – The Click Through Rate (or better known in short – CTR). Why is CTR important? What makes it a more attractive parameter than many others out there? And what is the best approach to get a high CTR, hands down?

Why is CTR important?

CTR is really important to measure the success of a marketing campaign. Some people still debate that it’s not really the CTR but the actual sales that should be used to measure success of a marketing campaign. But I would humbly argue on the fact that what if you did the best possible marketing and got a really high CTR, but then your product itself wasn’t that good enough – after all customers are not stupid – and you don’t end up making a sale. Who is to blame in this situation? Is it the marketing team who did a phenomenal job getting an exceptional CTR? Or is it the sales team for not doing their part well? Or is it the product development team for not building something that really solve customer’s problems? The question is not who’s to blame, the question rather is that when that happens how do you find where the problem is and how you fix it? Having read that, now most probably you’d agree that a CTR is a good indication of how well your marketing campaign was crafted and run.

What does having a high CTR mean?

Having a high CTR directly reflects how effective your marketing campaign is. This means how many visitors who saw your Ad actually clicked. That tells you won the first step of the battle – i.e. creating the first initial curiosity in the visitor and having him/her come to your landing page.

What is The Best Way to get High CTR?

Before we go into the complicated discussion of finding the right keywords, and going into the territory of speculating how Google Adwords works and things like that, let’s step back and think about it. Let’s take an example. Let’s say you are looking for car loans. And so you of course use Google or Bing or any other search engine and land on pages that talk about how to take car loans, what are the available rates and so forth. Now while you are reading through all those pages that have information related to car loans, would you ever click on a Ad that says “Join school this summer”? Probably not; well may be if that’s something that’s going on at the back of your mind; but then that’s just you. Every person is unique and thankfully Internet is not smart enough to read the “cookies” of our brain! God knows how Google Search Results and Ads would look if they start reading into our brains and start leaving cookies directly into our brain!! Anyways, so the point is that you’d rather click on an Ad that’s relevant to what you are reading about; what you are looking for, etc. For example, you might click on the Ad that says “Looking for a great car loan? click here”, or may be the one that says “click here to compare car loan rates” and so forth.

The best way to get high CTR is by advertising to extremely targeted pages that have content that’s relevant to your Ad. Unfortunately there are very few (in fact none!) systems out there that will provide complete transparency and let you choose exactly where your Ad goes, how much you pay and how much does the person who is hosting the Ad gets paid. If there were such a transparency how would the Ad companies make money! That’s a separate discussion, if high CTR is something that you are looking for, then you might want to check AdNet.

One of the most common ways to advertise over the Internet (apart from using Google Adwords) is by directly partnering with an advertising publisher. For example you could use ellipsis AdNet to find an advertising publisher for publishing your Ads. There are lot of benefits in doing so. First off, you have full control of exactly where your Ad would show, who would show your Ad and exactly to what kind of visitors. However, there is always this risk of not knowing exactly what kind of traffic your site would get. The good part is that if you really know the right questions that you should ask every publisher, you’d definitely end up choosing the right publishers. Here are some of the questions you should ask:

Is Your Advertising Publisher caters to Your Niche Market?

The first question that you should ask your advertising publisher, and rather yourself, is that what market does your advertising publisher cater to? No matter how good the publisher is, but if he’s focused towards a niche market that has nothing to do with your business, chances are that the visitors coming to that publisher would have nothing to do with your products and services. It will be a shear waste of your money to advertise through that publisher. Many publishers are good and will tell you up front if your Ad would fit with their content and their theme. But many out there are just there to host any, and I literally mean just about any, Ad as long as they get paid. You need to very carefully assess the publisher, read his mater, his method of advertisement, etc. and see what market he really caters to before you sign any contract.

Does Your Advertising Publisher provide a Media Kit?

When it comes to finding what kind of market your advertising publisher caters to, one of the best ways is to ask for a “media kit”. All good publishers that have fairly good traffic provide a freely download-able media kit that merchants can see to find more details about the kind of visitors that come that publisher. If your publisher can’t provide a media kit, ask for past 6 months analytics data. Ask for as much data as you can so that you can come up with your own quick analysis and figure out what kind of traffic are you really going to get. For example, let’s say your product strictly focuses on men below age 25. You shouldn’t be marketing on a website that caters to women over 50 no matter how high traffic that website might be getting. There’s a lot of such fine grain information that a good media kit will provide you and that will help you a lot in figuring out if the publisher is right for you.

What other advertisements does Your Advertising Publisher hosts?

The next thing to assess is other advertisements on the publisher’s network. If the current advertisements on the publisher’s site are way too all over the place, then it might not be a good idea for you to place your company’s Ad there. Publishers who have focused material and focused Ads have the best quality traffic and those are the publishers that you should be looking out for.

Is Your Advertising Publisher flexible?

Every business is unique. There are lot of good publishers out there who’ll listen to your needs and give you a customized deal. For example, always ask for a pilot integration. Check out what kind of results does the publisher generate for you. Is the advertising effort really resulting in good leads for you? In addition, there might be situations wherein you might need a more customized Ad integration (perhaps a link in the menu items, publishing to a twitter feed), etc. Some publishers are not willing to change their offers and plans based on a client’s requirements and it’s not that they are not good. Most probably, in fact, they are really large publishers and might be able to provide you a lot more exposure. However it’s all up to you to decide what kind of publisher you are comfortable working with. Remember that advertising engagements typically run for months and sometimes years. So you really want to work with a publisher who’d provide you all the support and flexibility needed for you to grow your business.

Is Your Advertising Publisher Reputable?

Last, but not the least, it’s important to check how reputable the publisher is. There are thousands and thousands of publishers and bloggers on the Internet who’d provide you a decent advertising space. Many of them have very neat media kits and will happily be as flexible as needed. However, remember that it’s going to be a long term engagement. Check on the reviews of the publisher (if available). Ask for references of other clients and get their feedback. In the end, you want to work with a reputable publisher who knows what he’s doing and can help you not only just advertise, but advertise in a way that it makes a good impact on your business.

Hope this helps. If you are looking for more information on where to go from here, check out ellipsis AdNet today!

Advertising is, hands down, one of the the best methods to reach out to newer markets and generating new leads. Since most of the times advertising doesn’t come cheap, one of the most important questions that every merchant needs to answer is how to find a good and trustworthy advertising partner. Most of the times this is done either through word of mouth, recommendations or after building a long term relationship through some other partnership (for example you might be already working with a client regarding say getting your business cards printed and then you find that they do provide advertising services and since you are happy with their service for years, you might want to try them out for your advertising needs).

Since not every one has the time and liberty to find a trustworthy advertiser, they often rely on an established third party, for example Google AdWords, Bing or Facebook. While they provide a really good platform and can let you start advertising for as low as $5 per month! (which to be frank, would really won’t give you much traction – you’d rather use that money to go and get a burger! but that’s a separate topic), they certainly are not cheap. This might look ironic at first. The reality is that due to the inherent bidding based system, you’ll end up paying much more for your advertising needs if you really want to reach out to high traffic sites. All these advertising platforms do a fairly good job to make sure your Ad shows up on relevant pages, but when competition is high and a single click costs tens of dollars you can’t really rely on them. That is the reason why more and more merchants are moving away from these methods and are partnering up with the advertisers directly.

AdNet provides a completely transparent method for connecting merchants and publishers for advertising over the Internet. Contractual obligations in advertising are one of the biggest concerns for both parties and that’s where AdNet provides real value. It not only makes the negotiation painless and quick, by being on the network you are sure that you are dealing with a trustworthy partner. Check it out today here: http://apps.ellipsissolutions.com/adnet/

Every startup needs to grow quickly; And one of the proven ways to quickly grow is by advertising and reaching out to targeted audience. There are several ways this can be done; However for a startup, the biggest challenge is to be able to keep advertising expenses low, yet be able to create an impact. Unfortunately this reduces the number of options. In this article we will share a few of these options.

1. Advertising through blogs and forums

First off, you must regularly blog and write fresh and unique content. Writing unique content is not as hard as many people would think. All you have to do is write about your own thoughts. If you can’t write, think about what comes to your mind; Think about how you talk with your friends just about on any topic. Sure all that has been discussed and written before, be it talking about what the President is doing to how good the new movie is, etc. You sure have opinions and you don’t dare to share it with your friends. Blogging is almost the same. All you have to do is be genuine. One thing that you should remember though is that your blogs must be related to your line of business. This will make sure that you are able to attract a very targeted set of people towards your blog; People who would be interested in your thoughts and later in your products. It is very important to keep the blog clean and be consistent about your ideas. Create logical categories so that it’s easier for people to look for information. Take this blog site as an example. Apart from blogging another important thing that you should be doing is talking about your ideas and marketing your blog and your product on other forums. Find ten most active forums related to your line of business. Keep a close eye on the discussions going on those forums. Contribute and participate in the discussions. This is the best way to not only share your ideas and leave a memorable impact in the minds of the readers but also advertise your products. Setting up your own blog and blogging on other forums is free; It just needs time!

2. Publishing White Papers

If you are really good at what you are doing and have something innovative going on then one of the best ways to attract like minded people and grow quickly is to publish white papers about your work. If your idea is patentable and something that you’d rather not share then just make sure not to put too much details around that. However you can always write good white papers talking about the problem you are trying to solve or your analysis about the Industry. People are always looking out for fresh and genuine information and writing a white paper is one of the best ways to really reach out to the most targeted audience. There are lot of university online libraries and forums that allow submitting white papers for free and they have really good reputation. Do make sure to research and find out the libraries that are related to your line of business. You do not want to talk about say a jet ski design on a clothing industry related forum or online library.

3. Posting News Releases

News Release sites are indexed and monitored by all major search engines. And so this is one of the best ways to quickly spread news about your business. There are lot of free news publishing websites. Simply pick top three or five news agencies that publish news related to your line of business and publish anything new. Even if you are a one or a two man company there’s still a lot you can talk about; for example launching a new feature; organizing a local event to gather some traction and so forth. Make a habit of publishing a news release once a month. Be consistent in publishing news releases. Remember that a news release is not a blog; So you shouldn’t use this method to share your thoughts and ideas.

4. Partnering with trusted network of publishers

Using bid based advertising methods like Google Adwords can turn out to be really expensive really quickly. Also there’s a learning curve of a couple of months involved with such systems. A better way is to directly partner up with publishers who publish material related to your line of business. For example if you run a resume writing company, it would make sense for you to advertise on local job forums and websites related to career, etc. Try products like AdNet to connect with a trusted network of publishers.

5. Directory Submissions

Another good way to get traction is submit your business URL to various directories. There are lot of cheap directory submission services available out there. Do not use them! Most of them are either really costly or totally useless. The ones that claim to submit to thousands of directories for pennies are the most useless ones. Spend your own time to finalize on the directories that have good reputation and most importantly are related to your line of business. Do submissions yourself. You will be surprised that it only takes a few days to do this and you can get amazing results very quickly.

So here you have it. Five quick and simple ways to get some good traction for almost no money. Of course this doesn’t mean that companies who spend millions of dollars on advertising are stupid. Sure they get enormous traction with that; But remember that they can afford it. As a startup, the biggest hurdle for you is going to be the money constraint. Don’t give and try out these five techniques and we are sure you’ll see the results that you had been waiting to see!

When it comes to advertising on the Internet, “pay-per-click” comes to mind before anything else. Google Adwords has undoubtedly made more innovation in the “pay-per-click” advertising model than any other company out there. They have defined standards and shown how to benefit from pay-per-click advertising in a much more articulate way than any other company. However that’s not the only way to advertise on the Internet. Even though it is one of the most used methods of advertising on the Internet, it is one of the most cursed ones too. Some people have had really good success with it while many have failed terribly and have learned the art the hard way by burning lot of time and money. The problem is not always in the way you use pay-per-click advertising but in the time when you are using it. The little known fact is that not every business should be using pay-per-click. In this article we will discuss how to find out if you are ready for pay-per-click advertising or not.

Is your Website Search Engine Optimized?

The very first question that you must ask yourself even before jumping into any sort of Internet Advertising is that is your website Search Engine Optimized or not. Being Search Engine Optimized is not just about getting more back links or trying to hack around how Search Engines work and trying to come on the first page of the Search Engines. Google’s documentation about best SEO practices talks about some of the great things that you can do to make your site Search Engine Optimized. All you have to be is genuine and use the HTML tags defined by W3C Foundation as judiciously as you can.

How much can you spend for “pay-per-click”?

Many people don’t calculate how much can they really afford any pay-per-click Advertising before they actually get burnt and learn that it’s too expensive for them. To be able to figure out how much is too much for your pay-per-click advertising effort, you will first need to figure out how many clicks you can drive to your website and out of those how many actually generate business for you. Once you know the how much business you can actually generate, you can then figure out roughly how much money will you be OK spending on advertising. Let’s take an example to better understand this concept. Let’s say you know that out of 100 people who visit your website, only 5 actually give you business. Let’s say from every purchase on your site, you make $30 profit which can be allocated towards advertising. So now you know that you can generate $150 from 100 visitors coming to your site. Now keep in mind that the more targeted clicks you can get, the better will be your conversion. Getting targeted clicks is one of the most key aspects of any pay-per-click advertising. Having said that, since now you know that your cost per click is $150/100 = $1.50, you shouldn’t be selecting any advertising method that turns out to be more costly than that. The trick here is that you won’t know what your conversion is and how much your actual cost per click is until you try. So you will have to keep on improving upon your keywords and pay-per-click advertising strategy until you have fully optimized it. Typically it takes a few weeks to sometimes few months to perfect the model. Unfortunately many people fail to stick that long because they start wrong; they end up burning lot of cash quickly!

There are lot of pay-per-click advertising systems available in the market right now. Google Adwords is just one of them. And in fact, no matter how so popular it might seem, there are lot of very successful systems out there. The best advertising systems are the ones that cut down the middle man and help you directly connect with the publishers. In the end, advertising is inevitable, and pay-per-click advertising is there to stay. The catch is for you to decide when you are ready for it.

Entrepreneurs around the World are faced with more challenges than most people are in their day to day lives. Extremely dynamic situations, extremely low funds, extremely hard deadlines, and many more of such constraints are common and something that every entrepreneur has to face without much choice. In this article we will cover some of the key tools that have turned out to be really useful for most of the entrepreneurs out there. If used in coherence, together these tools and techniques act as a life saver swiss army knife for the entrepreneur who’s struggling to prevail in the jungle.

Reliable Website Hosting Vendor

Whether your business is software or Internet related or not, in today’s World, you will most certainly need a website. Your website will not only help you reach out to a much larger audience in lesser time than with any other medium. Your success with your Website depends on how reliable your hosting vendor is. Our suggestion is to go with a dependable hosting vendor. You won’t know all the nuances of working with a Website Hosting Vendor until you actually deal with one. And the fact is that almost every vendor out there has their pros and cons. So you will have to be really diligent and keep evaluating your vendor on all the aspects that you’d need in future. Moving from one vendor to the other becomes really painful task, the later you do it, and the more features you have to migrate, the more painful it becomes. So do a pilot test and test out all the possible features you’d need few months down the line before you sign a long term contract with your hosting vendor.

A Toll Free Business Phone Number

You will very soon realize that you cannot use your personal phone for all the calls you’ll need to handle for your business. Having a Toll Free Business Phone Number is another thing in line that will boost your business more than you can imagine. A Toll Free Number (and even better a “Vanity Number”) adds a kind of surety in the eyes of the caller (or the prospective customer) that you mean “business” and care about the people who call for business purpose.

A PO Box

If you are starting out right from your home or garage like most entrepreneurs do, this is something that you will find really useful to have. There will be many times when you’ll need to receive business mail and it’s always a better to have a PO Box for all such mails. It also helps not only to keep your business mail separate from your personal mails, it also is considered a more professional way to work because the sender knows that he/she sending a business mail to a business PO Box and not to someone’s home address.

A Good Lead Generation System

Once you have come up with a product or a service, the next major step is to actually find customers and sell your product! This is the most important part of your business, hands down. Not being able to find enough customers and traction in time is the most common and most well known reason of why small businesses fail within the first few years of their inception. A good lead generation system is more desperately needed by a company during the start up phase than during any other phase of the company. Especially because you are running with limited funds, you need to be able to find a lead generation vendor that understands the needs and limitations of not only a small business, but a start up business. There are a lot of small businesses out there which have been successfully running for years. They don’t necessarily fall in the category of “start up”. A start up has a bigger challenge at hand. It’s not only small, but also it needs to prove itself out there against all the competition. A good lead generation system will help you find the leads that you need to grow your businesses and will help you leverage all the features provided by the system as you grow, and when you need it.

A Good Advertising System

No matter what kind of business you are in, you will need to find a way to effective and affordable way to advertise it. One of the biggest challenge in this area is that there are just so many ways to advertise that many entrepreneurs fail to choose the right one more often than you can imagine. You can advertise in magazines, yellow pages, you can advertise on radio, advertise on television, you can sponsor events, advertise in conferences, buy pay-per-click advertising on the Internet and so on. The biggest challenge is to understand what kind of business and what kind of market you are in and where your potential customers are. Since you are running on limited funds and are very new to market, you need to find out that particular niche of people who would be interested in trying out your product and not only will they be willing to try out, you need to make sure that you will be able help them out. Remember that these very first set of customers are the ones who will provide good feedback about your business and will help you grow. So a good advertising system for you is the one that helps you not only get exposure at an affordable price, but also helps you reach out to really focused clientele.

If you have ventured into a start up you will most certainly be able to relate to all these things. And more than that, we are sure you’ll have more to share! If so, please do not hesitate and let us know what you used or are still using to grow your start up.

When you are marketing products or services over the Internet, there’s one thing that you almost cannot avoid. I use the word “almost” because unfortunately many people know only one way to market over the Internet. That is Adwords. Be it Google, Bing or any other, Adwords provides a simple and easy way to quickly advertise products and services over the Internet. And it works on the concept of bidding. Well, we all know what’s that, so I won’t cover “what is bidding” in this article. What I will cover though is some of the aspects of bidding and help you decide if Bid Based Advertising Good for You.

Your Internet Marketing Budgets are over $5000 per Month

Typically bid based advertising platforms work well if you can out-bid your competitors. Google AdWords can turn into a very costly method of advertising if you don’t keep a close tab on the keywords and bids. The catch is that if you spend less money and highly focused keywords, you end up shrinking your exposure, or getting exposure on pages that would be hardly seen by the people you want to reach out to.

It is a known fact that most of the companies who are able to achieve some good traction using AdWords are the ones who spend anywhere close or above $5000 per month. Anything less than that and you’d be in real hard territory of problems competing against your competitors.

It is hard for you to find Media Publishing Partners

Most of the large corporations directly partner with media publishers and totally cut any middle man like AdWords. This is the best strategy to get maximum exposure and extremely good results because as part of the partnership, both the parties decide exactly when, where and how the Ads would be displayed. Both parties exactly know what will work for each others benefit and come up with a contract accordingly.

However, the problem is that up until now there was no way for small players to establish such contracts. Using AdNet, small and medium business can now create similar publishing contracts and totally cut any middle man.

You have High Profit Margins

To be able to afford bid based advertising systems, you should first have a really good profit margin. For example, if you are willing to spend $50 per click, you should better have that incorporated as part of your profit margin. If your business has low profit margins, you will very soon realize that bid based advertising systems like Google Adwords or Bing will turn out to be really costly.

When it comes to advertising on the Internet, concepts like AdSense have been extremely popular mainly because of the fact they are easier to use and there is no need to interact with the actual merchant to be able to host the Ad. In case of AdSense, the solution provider (such as Google or Bing) takes care of making sure that the correct Ad shows up in your “AdSense space”. In return they pay a commission. Often this commission is only 30 to 40% of what they actually get from the merchant on per click basis.

Traditional Advertising is a method by which publishers and merchants contact each other directly regarding advertising. Thus, Traditional Advertising helps completely by passing any technology intervention such as AdSense. This has lot of benefits. Some of them are:

1. Low cost of Advertising for the Merchants

For the merchant, completely by passing AdSense like technology means tremendously low cost of advertising because there is no middle man eating up the fat commission.

2. Better Targeted Traffic and more control

Since you as a merchant would be directly in touch with the publisher and will know where your Ad is going to be displayed, you will get much better targeted traffic. Imagine if you own a Bar in Downtown San Francisco. You will get much better results if your Ads show up on blog sites focused on San Francisco Local Bars. In no way can AdSense generate such focused results. At the same time, merchants and publishers have close control over the binding contract and they can negotiate and re-negotiate anytime for the benefit of each other.

3. High Advertising Revenue for the Publishers

For publishers, this means that they will get 100% of what the merchant is paying for advertising. No commission in between means higher advertising revenues.

4. Building a Partnership

Growing business is all about being able to easily partner with your vendors. The smoother you can achieve that, the more easy would it be for you to grow quickly and benefit each other. Since technologies like AdSense completely hide this ability from the users, traditional advertising enables this by enabling communication between merchants and publishers at all times. This helps build a long term relationship between both parties.

No doubt that traditional advertising has been the main method of advertising by many big corporations even now. What do you think?