Paid Website Marketing

 
Paid search engine marketing comes down to four popular groups. Of theses groups the open bid position system is used probably more than 90% of the time, so it’s the main form used today.

Below are the four main types of Paid Website marketing:

Search Engine Marketing - open bid positioning
Internet banner ads
Internet paid links
Miscellaneous... includes internet media compaigns outside the internet.
*Click Fraud is not a desired form of paid marketing however it often becomes part of it.

Search engine marketing - Open bid positioning:

Using the open bidding position as an application of search engine marketing you are bidding against your competitors for the top positions within each of the search engines. A new advertiser can go to Yahoo paid marketing (formerly Overture) or Google, sign up, and within 24 hours see your ads appear online. When you set up your internet search engine marketing campaign you will be asked what key words you would like to advertise under. This is where you will compile a list of key words that best describe what you are trying to sell. For example if you sell soap, your key word is "soap". If you also have green soap to sell then you may also add "green soap" as an additional key word. Each of your keywords should be descriptive words people would use to search for the items you are selling. Realistically speaking your keywords will be your product line. After you compile a list of relevant keywords Yahoo will then ask you to describe what it is you have to offer. These will then become your ads description, see below for an example. Paid search engine marketing is often referred to as Pay per Click. Next, you will be prompted for the amount you are willing to pay per click for each of your selected key words. These amounts may vary based on the items demand online.

The average at home internet user can have it figured out within an hour or two. I asked a new assistant of mine to go and try to figure it out, and in about an hour she was almost proficient at the paid search engine marketing program. Most paid search engine marketing firms act like paid marketing is some real hard thing to do, perhaps it is real hard for them or they want to charge you hundreds of dollars for 10 minutes of work that almost any minimally literate computer user could do on their own.

Search Engine Marketing Bidding-

Anyone with money can be number one online within the paid search engines, but does that mean you will make more money? Or go broke spending it? Depends! Keep in mind when you are bidding for top search engine placement and do bid and get the top paid position that you yourself have also made a statement that says this, "I believe this key word is worth paying more for than any other person thinks its worth". Sometimes people are correct, but most of the time, they are wrong. The problems with paid search engine marketing are great but will soon increase.

Today very few people understand paid marketing, so very few persons are bidding for key terms. Most of the people doing the bidding understand that they must still be able to make a profit at the end of the day. Knowing this they stay within their means and avoid bidding to high. An important element to take into consideration when bidding is the return on investment or ROI for short. People that follow ROI’s understand profit as well as bottom lines and bid accordingly. New advertisers more often then not will overbid and soon find their way into internet paid search engine marketing, when the flood comes many big Internet firms will go under. The day comes and almost every other person and companies begin to bid on web positions. The effect will over inflate click prices and over inflate it to the point of making it non-profitable, perhaps even killing many large established online retailers with paid only marketing plans.

Many new internet retailers seem to come and go. Most new website owners want to be millionaires and are usually done talking about their great new web site in about 6 months to a year. That’s about how long it takes for them to figure out that their dream has died. Unfortunately, during this time they still have the big internet dream and some may also have some money to spend. So the new guy begins his online business knowing almost nothing about e-commerce and starts to spend money. New advertisers love to see their website listed number one in the search engines, so they enter into the bidding game and over bid just to get the top paid position. This works out really well for Yahoo and Google. It’s like bringing a person to a high stakes Black Jack game that has never played black Jack. This would be a Casino's best potential customer; this customer will most likely make many mistakes that will favor the casino. This customer may even upset the flow of the whole table and others gambling around them, perhaps even frustrate other players into making mistakes. However you analyze it, "a fool and their money will easily part". Google and Yahoo understand this very well, so instead of making an arena of experts only, they are inviting anyone and everyone to start the bidding!

Keep in mind the search engines job is to make money. They will not be loyal to you, when other additional dollars are available. What this means is that if a company grows thru a paid marketing campaign, which many do, they have no assurance that a group of newcomers won't come and stupidly drive them out of business by over bidding on a search term. You may build a company up with infrastructure, leases, employees, etc... and then have it all disappear as quick as it came because an uneducated business person has overbid your key search terms to the point that you know the ROI will be a money loser. Of course you can wait till they run out of money but most likely there will be another newcomer with a pocket of cash to overbid your search term. Fortunately, internet marketing does not end here.

Random Internet banner ads / Pop up ads
Banner ads and pop up ads must be done with great skill! I have never witnessed a company successfully drive a paid search engine marketing campaign based on this approach to marketing. Banner ads are perhaps the most dangerous investment possible on the web today. Banner ads have begun to declining allowing for pop ups to replace them. Pop ups are simply the new selling tool created to replace banner ads. Pop ups create an enormous amount of disrespect to many internet users. I personally would rather not have them. My guess is that they will most likely become heavily controlled or hopefully banned in the near future. Consumer reactions to them are overwhelmingly negative. From my point of view few companies with long term business goals should buy banner or pop ups, this type of marketing can clean out bank accounts quickly and with very low ROI. When using paid banner ads, be sure to do some background research on the site you will be placed on. Remember this is going to be the first impression the online community will have of your company.

Paid links on a site
This form of paid marketing is usually not between you and the search engines. Let’s say you sell butter, and butter only. You may want to contact an online company that is selling bread only, and ask them if you can buy a link on their site that will direct people to your site to buy butter. If the bread company is not already selling butter they may be willing to list you on their site as a butter retailer with a direct link to your site. This is Different from a banner ad because it will not be on random websites, this form of paid search engine marketing can work extremely well when you have associated products like bread and butter. One thing to be cautious of is to ensure your product and the site you are buying a link from will have enough in common to drive business to your site, if you sell butter you will not want to link with a company selling shoes. Otherwise it will perform like a banner ad, with low performance, which is bad for your company. Paid links when done well can have a large pay off.
Miscellaneous
This form of internet advertizing is often used for an aulternative internet marketing campain. This would include newpaper, magazine, TV, radio, flyers, billboards. For an internet based business this type of marketing will have the lowest return on investment. Internet dollars are best used when done so on the internet. Taking money from an internet advertizing campaign can be done but most be done so in a very narrow search.

Click Fraud
CAUTION: Click fraud may soon be a rising concern for many internet advertisers – in the near future there may be a great deal of publicity brought to light to the general advertising public concerning click fraud leaks thru many major search portals. Google, Yahoo, and MSN will have their hands full trying to catch click fraud bandits and will most likely never go with out the problem. For now the click fraud artists are gaining, but resources will soon be used to weed these con companies out. Experienced Search Engine Marketing skills can detect click fraud.

Click fraud is not done by search engines such as: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Click fraud is the result of an individual thief or thief company. These bandits work by cheating large search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN, resulting in charges to unsuspecting advertisers. Right now there are many different forms of click fraud which is ever changing. An example of click fraud would include an automated way of using an online robot that is programmed to click on advertisers’ links. Most often it is a simple machine that is powered by hundreds of mother boards clicking on links creating a profit for that particular company. They simply build a website and then get a few companies to pay per click on their website. Once they are listed on the website they are then visited by the robot who is generating clicks for the owner of the website in order to increase profit. Which means the website you are listed on is giving you what you think are real clicks when in turn it’s a machine that is creating a profit off of your company. Currently, this is a huge issue that is being addressed by some of the larger search engines in order to eliminate this type of fraudulent activity.