Insurance and Credit

Most online marketing “gurus” focus exclusively on getting traffic to your blog or website from sources like Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon and Digg. But before you jump into their strategy, consider a few of the following flaws with mass-media user-generated websites like MySpace and Facebook:

* Myspace and Facebook have a huge number of dead pages – So many users have “been there, done that” that they do not login to there accounts anymore. You would basically be marketing to the wall. * Myspace and Facebook has implemented numerous safety guards – They have made changes which are hypersensitive against spam, and they label any outgoing links as spam or potential phishing sites. This puts a scare into people using these services, and causes them to apprehensive to clicking any outgoing links to your site. * Social Networking is about dead – When these services were new, they were great. While you may find some amount of success with these sites, your effectiveness rate would be about 30% of what you would normally expect.

Unfortunately, that is the sad truth.

While Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is a great way to promote your website, SEO takes a long time to take effect. It can take years for your site to achieve natural, organic results in the form of targeted traffic.

Perhaps the fastest and quickest way to drive traffic to your website using the search engines is through using pay-per-click advertising services, or PPC. PPC allows you to place an ad on the search engines based on the keywords which people search. You only pay for advertising when someone clicks through your ad. Three of the top PPC programs are:

Google Adwords Yahoo Search Marketing MSN Adcenter

There are other services such as Miva which is used often; and, incidentally, Facebook has an excellent PPC program, which seems to be highly targeted — it laser targets your potential visitors by age, interests, location, and much more. This ensures that the right audience is seeing your ads — maximizing exposure — and providing you with quality, fresh leads.

Rates for PPC traffic are always a little different, depending on the quality of traffic, the website purchased at, the service being used and the keyword chosen. For example, traffic targeted towards people interested in “credit cards” would be much more expensive than traffic targeted towards people interested in “elephants” – to use an extreme comparison.

You pay the price of the ad only when someone actually clicks on your ad. The goal is to figure out how much your website makes per targeted visitor, and then purchase traffic at a rate slightly less than how much you make. You’ll instantly turn a profit. An ROI of anything is justified because the entire process is automatic.

If you are looking for a quick way to drive traffic to your website using the search engines, PPC is the most obvious route to take in your marketing endeavors.

Tags: business, facebook, Finance, Home based Business, home business, internet marketing, make money online, Marketing, money, myspace, online business, Personal Finance, ppc, SEO, social media

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 5:46 am and is filed under Personal Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.