There are a variety of advertising options available to online business owners small and large. There’s traditional banner advertising, text ads of both static and contextual varieties, popups and popunders, layer ads and pay-per- click search engine advertising.

For just about any business looking to advertise online, pay-per-click search listings should come first and be used to their maximum potential before investing elsewhere. They are the foundation of most online advertising plans, delivering the most precise targeting and the furthest reach for the lowest cost.

The concept of pay-per-click, or PPC search advertising is simple — you have your listing placed within or alongside search results in exchange for paying some fee each time a someone clicks on your listing in those search results. Most search engines set advertisers against eachother in auction-style bidding for the highest positions on search result pages.

There are several benefits to this advertising method that make it useful to just about any web business, and make it so important that it should be exploited to its fullest before advertising in any other medium.

BENEFIT #1: TARGETING

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Of all people in the world I was easily one of the most pessimistic about computers, the Internet and now that I even know they exist-blogs. I think blogs are pretty cool but I never thought I could have one. I thought the processes of getting a site; domain name and the actual building of the blog would just be out of my league. I’m a complete novice when it comes to technology, but I do like writing a journal, and I thought having a journal on-line would be both fun and make life simpler for me. No more writing with pens, other people can read my stuff and comment on it, and I could add pictures to illustrate my points and make things look more interesting.

Well, now I’ve got one! It’s awesome. I won’t lie and say it was easy, but I think if you hook up with a good web hosting company it’s not such a daunting experience as you might expect. I got a few work mates to help me. I went through a couple administrative hitches when filling in my personal information forms for the registration-just because I’m a bit silly in the head. We had a little trouble with the blog program we used, but these challenges were eventually overcome. My boss says he’s going to make a simple program that people can hook up easily.

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Search engines are constantly tweaking their ranking algorithms and when that happens some pages lose their top ranking positions. One such event was the infamous Florida Update. Many pages were practically kicked-out of the top 1000 pages for competitive keywords.

With recent updates, webmasters have been thinking that Google does not use PageRank because low PR pages can get very good rankings. Before that everyone was saying that PageRank was THE factor for top positions. Now, everyone is saying that keyword rich anchor text links from many different sites is the key for the top ranks.

All these recent events seem to indicate that search engine algorithms are totally unpredictable, right? Wrong!

All search engines are going in the very same direction. The scientific literature related to information retrieval and recent search engine patents reveal the not-so-distant future of search engine ranking algorithms.

Introducing Topic Specific Link Popularity

For the last few years search engines relied on General Link Popularity to assess the importance of every page. Relevancy was based on a combination of General Link Popularity (importance) and keyword matches on page and off page (anchor text of links for specificity).

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There comes a time in your efforts to market your website that you realise that it’s no longer enough to tell your family and friends to visit your website - you need to get some people who will pay you in cash rather than compliments. You need to start approaching other website owners and start building an online network of contacts.

This is a crucial step to achieving online success. I once read a quote that applied at the time to conventional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses but it just as pertinent if not more so for online businesses:

“You will not be successful by being a cave dweller.”

Kind of obvious but there are so many business owners that are cave dwellers. Sitting in their offices staring at the phone day after day wondering why no new prospects ever phone them up. You have to stand up, open the door and get out into the world and shout from the rooftops about your business. If you’re online you need to do the same for your website.

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It’s no big secret that banner ads have become less effective than text links over the years. This phenomenon is called “banner blindness”. Banners were so ubiquitous in the early years of the Internet that users simply began to ignore them.

So what did many advertisers do to combat banner blindness? They made their banners harder to ignore by causing them to flash, rotate, jump around, and all sorts of other annoying tricks.

This of course led most users to like banners even less!

Does this mean that banner ads are useless? No, not at all!

There are several things that you can do to make your banner campaigns more effective. First of all, ensure that each of your banners is pleasant to look at and blends in well with the web page it’s displayed on. Match up the design and color scheme with those of the site.

This means you’ll need to create a customized banner for each and every site you advertise on, but the results will most definitely make the extra effort and expense well worth it!

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Traffic Exchanges. What are they? How do they work? What do they do?

First of all, a “Traffic Exchange” is exactly that, a way to exchange traffic, a way to get visitors to your site. This happens by you visiting sites, in exchange for pageviews to your site.

There are LOTS of Traffic Exchanges out there. Some good, some bad, but most of them work in basically the same ways. You join, visit sites, refer others and build up credits.

There are 2 main types of Traffic Exchanges (there`s actually a few more types of exchanges, but these are the ones we`ll concentrate on here):

Manual Surf and Auto Surf.

With manual surf, you have to click on a button to get to the next site, with auto surf, you can sit back and watch the pages change automatically, without having to lift a finger. Nowadays, the trend seems to be that the exchanges offer multiple choices for surfing: manual, auto, different timers (15, 20 or 30 seconds before next site). A lot of them now offer games while surfing, as a chance to earn extra credits.

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The Internet may have started as the fervent brainchild of DARPA, the US defence agency - but it quickly evolved into a network of computers at the service of a community. Academics around the world used it to communicate, compare results, compute, interact and flame each other. The ethos of the community as content-creator, source of information, fount of emotional sustenance, peer group, and social substitute is well embedded in the very fabric of the Net. Millions of members in free, advertising or subscription financed, mega-sites such as Geocities, AOL, Yahoo and Tripod generate more bits and bytes than the rest of the Internet combined. This traffic emanates from discussion groups, announcement (mailing) lists, newsgroups, and content sites (such as Suite101 and Webseed). Even the occasional visitor can find priceless gems of knowledge and opinion in the mound of trash and frivolity that these parts of the web have become.

The emergence of search engines and directories which cater only to this (sizeable) market segment was to be expected. By far the most comprehensive (and, thus, less discriminating) was Deja. It spidered and took in the exploding newsgroups (Usenet) scene with its tens of thousands of daily messages. When it was taken over by Google, its archives contained more than 500 million messages, cross-indexed every which way and pertaining to every possible (and many impossible) a topic.

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This article is very important.

In fact, the chances are it will give you more sales from your website. Now I’m not suggesting you’re low on sales but we could all do with more sales right?

I first started using this word on my website about a year ago. Using the word changed the whole focus of my website, my business and my life!

Sounds unbelievable doesn’t it?

But it’s not, it’s entirely true and I want to share it with you.

You want to know what this word is don’t you? Okay then - no more messing around then.

This word is the reason you are reading this article and the reason you carried on reading after the first paragraph. Have you guessed it already? The single most important word you need to use on your homepage is “YOU”!.

You. You. You.

Using ‘YOU’ Brings Success

Using the word ‘you’ on your homepage can have dramatic effects on how effective your website is at converting visitors into enquiries and sales. Using the word ‘YOU’ gets across your business’ message in the only way that truly works - from the customer’s point of view.

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Directory marketing can help boost your companies performance a great deal. Not only will you get qualified leads for your business, your web site will also increase it’s traffic ranking a tremendous amount.

Here are a couple basic advantages to online directories,

• Substantial staying power
• Repetitive marketing
• Your listing grows with the entire site
• No updating unless necessary
• Not necessary to link back to the directory

Please Note: This article is meant to discuss and implement marketing strategies for local business directories online, not link exchange, a.k.a swapping links with other websites.

For many people, one/two directories always come to mind,

• http://dir.yahoo.com
• http://www.dmoz.com
• http://directory.google.com

With web marketing, you want to have ever lasting staying power, online directories can provide you with this and more.

Many people who DO NOT use the internet everyday stick with the basics when they come online. Many people are usually looking for a specific service or product that they want to check up on within their local community. This is why it is so crucial that you get noticed locally online.

Every major city has atleast one or two good business directories for you to submit your business to. Many of these directories don’t even require that you have a website.

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Do you publish an e-zine or newsletter? If you answer yes, you may already know how difficult it is to build your subscribers’ list.

Most people use fake or throw away e-mail addresses.

Most subscribers don’t last long. They subscribe fast and are also quick to unsubscribe.

These days most e-mails you send out to your subscribers don’t reach their destinations due to filters blocking them.

It is increasingly becoming a pain to publish an e-zine.

But before you give up, I want to offer you some internet advertising magical secrets to convert most of your visitors to subscribers without much efforts.

1. You could offer your visitors a discount on all the products you sell if they subscribe to your free e-zine.

2. You could offer your visitors a free ebook if they subscribe to your free e-zine.

3. You could offer your visitors a free subscription to your private web site if they subscribe to your free e-zine.

4. You could offer your visitors a free advertisement in your free e-zine if they subscribe.

5. You could offer your visitors a free tangible gift if they subscribe to your free e-zine.

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