Online Website Advertising
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David
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February 20th, 2012
Website marketing covers a lot of different methods from text links, banner advertising and sponsorships. Generally you advertise on websites that complement your products because you know the type of traffic that you'll receive is pretty targeted.
When it comes to website advertising your pricing is going to based on a few factors that I cover below. It's difficult to say what will work for you and what won't. Like most online marketers, trial and error is going to be the only way to find out what works best for you and your product or service.
Banner Advertising
Banner advertising is the practice of placing a banner on a website that offers a complementary product or service. You're probably familiar with animated banners as you'll find them on many of the most popular websites on the internet.
Sometimes you'll find a company that will develop a banner for you but in most cases you'll need to find a company to design one for you. It's important to design a banner that will draw the attention of the website visitor from the website's content to your banner and have a headline that peaks the interest of the person looking at the banner.
Below you'll find some banners that I had developed for my website BBQFans.com. You can have a banner made to any size that you'd like but I've included the most popular sizes that most websites will accept.
120 x 600
468 x 60
468 x 60
125 x 125
120 x 60
Text Link Advertising
Text link advertising is the practice of placing a text link to your website much like banner advertising.
There are two reasons that you may want to do this. The first reason is simply looking for increased traffic to your website. If the text that's used to link to your website is written well you can attract customers to visit your website.
The second reason is for search engine ranking purposes. As I mention in my page about reciprocal link exchanges, the more links to your website the better. This has been an area of concern lately because Google likes natural links to your website and frowns on paid links.
It's important to make sure that the link to your website isn't placed in an area that looks like it's a paid link. Words like sponsors, partners and links are buzz words that look suspicious so be cautious as to where the link is placed as it could do more harm than good.
Website Advertising Pricing Structures
Pricing the advertising space on a website can be determined a few different ways. There is really no right or wrong way to determine this cost. It's about educating yourself on the options and deciding what works best for you.
One method is to charge a flat rate, this is saying that you're going to charge someone $100 per month regardless of the results. The results being how often it's displayed or how often it's clicked on.
Another method is CPM or cost per 1000 impressions. This is determined by the number of times that their banner is displayed on your website. This is generally reserved for websites that receive thousands of hits per day. A way to bill such a method is $5 cpm, this is saying that you are charging the advertiser $5 for every 1000 times that their banner displays.
For demonstration purposes consider your website receives 50,000 hits per day and the advertisers banner displays 6,000 times on that day. The customer would owe you $30 worth of advertising that day.
Another popular method is CPC or cost per click. This is the practice of paying only when a website visitor clicks on an add on your website. For example, you charge $0.50 per click. The banner may be displayed 5,000 times that day but if it's only clicked on 50 times the customer would owe you $25.00.
Tracking Website Advertising Campaigns
It's important to track your website advertising campaigns otherwise you could be paying for advertising that isn't effective. There are a few different ways that you should consider to track your campaigns.
Majority of the analytic packages offer a way to create custom links within the software so that when that link is clicked the software keeps track of it. I recommend setting up a free Google Analytics account, it really gets in depth with the statistics that it provides. Did I mention that it's free?
Another way is just by creating a custom link. For instance you own BillsPhones.com and you want to advertise on a website and track the traffic from that link. You may provide the webmaster a link such as http://www.billsphones.com?click=phoneworld.
This is telling you that the hit to your website came from from PhoneWorld.com. You can pretty much enter anything that will make sense to you once you start analyzing your statistics. With that said, don't add the .com to the end of the website address.
Webmaster Forum
I invite you to visit my webmaster forum, it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on.