One of the biggest mistakes I made early on with my website was to try and save money and time by combining my online marketing and SEO efforts.

In many instances, I limited my banner and media advertising purchases to locations where the banner links would also count as “dofollow” links for my site with search engines. I never purchased links just to get the “link juice”, but I thought I was just being frugal by using my marketing campaigns to serve a dual purpose.

But I really wasn’t helping myself, or my site, in any way–and was actually wasting almost all of my marketing budget and time.

The truth is, online advertising already serves two purposes when done correctly. First, it can drive immediate, direct traffic to your site; and if that traffic is targeted (by where you did your advertising) then hopefully some of it will convert for you.

And the second purpose, which I think a lot of people overlook in online marketing, is to generate awareness for your business and inventory that translates into future customers.

I’ve spoken with several customers of my site who told me they heard of us from seeing banner ads we had purchased, and then acknowledged to me that they didn’t actually ever click on the ads.

But, just from seeing those banners the seed was planted in their minds that whenever they want or need something we carry, they should visit our site. And it worked.

It’s easy to get caught-up in the instant gratification that the web offers. To want to account for every penny of your advertising budget with direct clicks today that you can easily track.

But marketing has never worked perfectly like that because most people aren’t wired to respond immediately. It takes between 5 and 10 exposures to an advertising message before the average person will respond. This is why so many online marketers value “the list” so highly. They know they’re not going to make a sale on first contact with most people, so by getting you on their list it gives them those additional follow-up mailings for exposing you to their message over and over.

The upside is that once I figured out where I was doing it wrong, I began to look for ways to stretch my marketing and advertising budget out that would give me maximum exposure with my target audience, and the web is full of opportunities once you focus in on a goal like this.

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a definite no-no for me. Sure, it’s quick and easy to get going, especially with Google AdWords or on some of the major social networks now, but it only gives you a “first contact” interaction with potential customers.

Some will convert for you, especially from search listings, but most will be lost to you unless you can get them to join your mailing list from that first interaction. So, while PPC is effective for the right type of campaign, if you’re just trying to build a customer base it’s not really the best method in my opinion.

CPM (cost per thousand impressions) advertising is much better for building a customer base and brand loyalty; if you can find the right places to advertise that allow you to target your market audience.

With CPM advertising it gives you the opportunity to put your message in-front of potential customers over and over again, to plant those seeds in their minds. The downside is it’s a lot harder to track results because you’re actually hoping for responses that won’t involve the direct clicking of your banners–in addition to some direct clicks.

What I’ve done to compensate for that lack of tracking is to attempt to interact with new customers to my site as much as possible. This again serves two purposes. First, it’s just good customer service policy to make new customers feel welcomed, which goes a long way towards earning repeat business from them.

And second, it gives me the chance to ask how they heard of us, where they saw our advertising or whatever I want to know to help me judge what’s working in our advertising and what’s not.

Another problem with CPM is that it can get very expensive if you target heavy traffic, popular sites. You might find a site that looks like it meets your target demographic perfectly, see that they offer affordable CPM rate advertising and think you’ve got a golden opportunity–only to see your advertising budget exhausted too quickly because you miscalculated how many impressions that site would give you.

Or, in some worst case scenarios, you might purchase CPM advertising with an unscrupulous site owner who uses bots to inflate (steal) ad impressions. It’s not common in my experience, but it does happen.

So, my referred method of advertising buying has become time-based purchases. I look for sites where the general audience is going to match my target demographic, and where I can purchase advertising for a set rate and specific length of time; normally a month.

This works best for me because most of my advertising campaigns will last for 4 to 8 weeks, for example I’ve just begun advertising our line of Halloween Costumes for this year, and will run those promotions from now (mid-August) until mid-October, when because of shipping times our Halloween sales end. That’s an 8 week set period, so over the last 2 weeks I found a bunch of websites and blogs that I liked and felt would match my target needs, and purchased banner advertising on all that had openings for the next 8 weeks. Every purchase was for the time period, not for CPM’s or PPC’s–and none of the purchases had anything to do with my SEO efforts. It’s strictly about putting my website and products in-front of potential customer’s eyes at a time when I know they’ll be considering Halloween costumes.

I’ve also found that buying for time periods rather than even getting into discussions of CPM’s has opened up more advertising opportunities for me.

Many times I’ll find a blog or site that I’d like to advertise on, but the owner doesn’t normally sell direct advertising. I’ve found that if I approach them and start talking about CPM’s and click rates they seem to sometimes become overwhelmed and get nervous about being in over their heads.

However, by sending a simple email that says who I am, and that I’d like to advertise my website (always give them your link so they can make sure they would approve of the destination) with a banner on their blog or site for 1 month, or 2 months or whatever set period of time–I get a much better response rate.

I never mention pricing in that first email, and don’t even request pricing from them. I wait to hear back and confirm their interest in selling me ad space, and if they include pricing information that’s great, but if not (which happens often with site owners who don’t normally sell direct advertising) then in my follow-up email I’ll suggest a fair rate and ask if it’s agreeable to them. Sometimes they will negotiate, and sometimes they’ll accept my offered rate. Once in a while they’ll counter with some outrageous price, at which point I just decline and move on. It’s not worth the time and hassle to try negotiating with anyone who has unrealistic expectations from the start I’ve found.

The point is, many blog and site owners who don’t normally sell direct advertising get overlooked by advertisers who focus in on known advertising locations, or search Google for terms like “advertise here”–so when approached in a friendly and fair manner, you can often get great deals with very targeted traffic for your ads.

Another place I love to look for deals is article directories. Some of the bigger ones are a bit expensive, but some of the medium to smaller and niche directories offer great rates for time based advertising, and the key bonus with these is you can often purchase ad locations in specific categories of the directories, so you can target very narrow demographics. A couple of good examples are WAHM-Articles.com and ContentCaboodle.com but you can find many others with a little searching. Typically with mid to small sized article sites you can get a full month of banner ads in a category for under $50, and with niche directories I’ve gotten deals as low as $25 for a full month.

Obviously blogs and article directories get less traffic than major social networks or Google search does, but the one thing these sites get is highly targeted long-tail search traffic, which means you’re advertising is showing to very targeted eyes. That makes these very effective resources for purchasing advertising in my opinion.

So keep your SEO and marketing separate, and become a little creative with where you do your your creatives purchasing and it will really pay off for you.

Technorati Tags: advertising, Marketing, Search engine optimization

Tags: advertising, Marketing, Search engine optimization

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Web Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.