Online Advertising Techniques
Online and offline marketing methods can be polar opposites. Although they both possess the same fundamentals, there are vast differences on how their respective strategies are implemented. Many businesses new to online advertising can quickly find themselves in trouble financially by following the same basic rules that they did in their offline advertising.
If you are new to online advertising, the first step you should take is learning about all the various online advertising tools. As you learn what advertising options are available, each one should be analyzed to see what best matches the strategy you are trying to implement. Most business owners find that the most effective way to market online is to develop a variety of strategies instead of only focusing on one or two.
There are numerous resources available to help you learn about your options, but developing the proper mix of advertising campaigns can be tough when first getting started. If you are at this stage, you can probably expect a lot of trial and error until finding what works for you within your budget.
How Search Engines Work
Search engine optimization is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. This means that, as a business owner, its important to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the user initiating a search.
They use programs called ‘spiders’ to index websites. This spider is an automated program that crawls a website, reads the content on the it and follows the links that the site connects to. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository where the data is indexed. It will visit each link listed on the website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so its not recommended to have a website with more than 500 pages.
Increasing Your Online Traffic
A website without traffic is like a city without people. It is wasted, as the sole purpose for it being created was for others to use it. Therefore, you need to spend as least as much time building access routes to your website, just like roads are built to a city, as you spend on the design of it, and the content for it.
You probably already know about the general methods of getting people to visit your website, so only a brief mention will be given to them here. Essentially, all traffic come from one of these three sources…
Inexpensive Ways to Generate Traffic
There are multiple ways to get traffic to your website for very little cost that can make you money online. If you just got a small proportion of those visitors to convert to leads or sales, that has cost you nothing but your time.
There are two hard facts of any internet business that you cannot escape. To make money online, you need to generate traffic to your website and second, you need to convert that traffic into buyers. You might try to do this directly by sending them to a sales page or you may do it indirectly by sending them to an opt-in page to capture their details or to your information site or blog.
First, you should focus on identifying your killer keywords – the ones that attract the right kind of people into you business. With a good match between what people are searching for and what you are offering, the actual traffic you generate will be more highly targeted and predisposed to your offer and so more likely to convert into buyers.
The Google Duplicate Content Penalty
The truth of the Google duplicate content penalty is quite simply that there is none! If that confuses you, then you have been reading too many misinformed forums or blogs where people get stuck on some popular term that they have no idea what it means, and then profess to be experts.
The only experts on the Google duplicate content penalty, and the only people who are qualified to define it, are Google, and in Google’s own words “There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty”. This comes directly from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.
That should be the end of this article, at precisely 96 words excluding title as I define my word count. But it is not. Why? Because even though this blog is operated by Google, and even though much the same has been stated by Matt Cutts, Google’s main software engineer, and other Google experts, people still argue and complain about the Google ‘duplicate content penalty’.
So here is the truth: you might ask who am I to know the truth, but I read all the Google blogs and their official statements, and in applying what I learn, I achieve excellent results for my web pages on Google search engine listings: and those of Yahoo, MSN and Bing. So I am coming from a sound base that my results can prove.
