Online advertising is a relatively young medium that has changed how people sell things in our society.
Whether we acknowledge it nor not, the Internet has substantially changed the world we live in.
It affects the way people communicate with each other, the way we learn about almost everything, the way we we find information and most importantly to Internet marketers; the way we shop for goods.
Google’s search engine serves an important role in how people do all of these activities.
- We can find information about almost any subject under the sun using Google’s search engine.
- We use Gmail to instantly communicate with each other anywhere on the planet.
- We use Google online to earn a degree from many learning institutions about almost any subject.
- Using Google and the Internet, we can now shop for almost anything without leaving the comfort of our homes.
In 1994, an advertising revolution began on the Internet when a website named HotWired.com decided to make money on their website and started showing banner ads on it’s web pages.
AT&T was the first advertiser to hook up with HotWired.com to create the 468 x 60 banner shown below.
Compared to today’s standards it was quite ugly but it started an advertising avalanche.
Early online advertising ideas of all types saturated the Internet and a host of start up businesses with high expectations quickly came to the realization that online advertising alone was not going to make them profitable.
After the 2004 dot com crash that sent thousands of Internet businesses and their investors into bankruptcy, several online advertising agencies began testing different advertising models.
Although there were still a lot of problems with pop-up and pop-under ads, online advertising surged.
In 2004, online advertising revenue jumped to almost $ 10 billion dollars a year, from what only ten years before was only a few thousand dollars per year.
Online advertising had become more profitable for online businesses as advertisers learned how to minimize the risk of alienating potential customers with unwanted ads.
Google launched their revolutionary keyword targeted advertising program called AdWords, in the year 2000.
Their advertising program showed only search specific advertisements on Google’s search engine and eliminated unwanted pop-up and pop-under ads.
Online advertising diversified in the 21st century to include news media, television, radio, billboards, emails, social media, mobile and video.
Today, people spend much more time online and for that reason online advertising has become a preferred method for Internet marketers to reach, engage and interact with the public.
Google AdWords can produce successful marketing campaigns that target a specific audience much more effectively than other traditional forms of advertising.
Online advertising campaigns allow marketers the ability to
- Reach profitable specific niche markets
- Reach different demographic groups in different languages
- Reach people throughout the world
- Reach broad audiences in a single advertisement
Google AdWords gives online advertisers the ability to reach 80% of over 180 million people in the United States alone with their network.
AdWords shows only relevant ads to potential buyers that are actively searching for a businesses product or service.
With Google’s analytical tools, advertisers can determine how effective their AdWords ads are performing and fine tune their ads as necessary.
Google’s search engine creator said that “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want”.
Although not perfect, Google’s powerful search engine allows anyone from anywhere to pinpoint the information they want in usually just under one second.
If history is any indicator, online advertising with Google using AdWords and AdSense can only be expected to get better in the future.
If you’re interested in driving more traffic to your business website or increasing the readership of your latest articles, start Tweeting for traffic.
Most Internet marketers will tell you that Twitter is mainly used to generate traffic.
What they don’t tell you is how to do it effectively.
Twitter, and other similar sites have a viral nature built into them. Twitter in particular, can tremendously increase the amount of web traffic your website or blog receives just by tweeting your site’s URL.
When you build up a decent following of “friends”; all you need to do to increase the readership of your article is to Tweet your friends and ask them to Tweet about your article.
Twitter is a great place to connect with other like-minded people who share an interest in your business or market niche.
You can develop strong relationships with other business owners and people whom you might otherwise have never met, just by tweeting.
Tweeting on twitter puts a face on companies, bloggers and website owners.
Twitter is loaded with smart people. If you get hang around the site for a while and read enough Tweets, it’s eventually bound to rub off on you.
Here are some tips on how to drive traffic with Twitter
- Optimize your Twitter profile.
When you sign up for your Twitter account, make sure that in addition to the information you provide when signing up, that you create a custom background image.
Your custom background allows you to integrate an image into your profile in the upper left corner.
Your contact information, business details and website URL should be incorporated into the image. If you signed up for a business account, do the same with it.
- Give your Twitter account a professional look.
Use your business brand, business logo and color scheme in your custom Twitter background.
You can use both your business and personal accounts to boost web traffic but make sure only highly relevant Tweets to your business are made with your business account. Personal Tweets belong to your personal profile.
While it’s okay to tweet about personal things in your personal account, it’s better to share something meaningful when you Tweet.
- Credibility is important when Tweeting for traffic.
Being credible on Twitter isn’t just about having a ton of random followers, it’s about attracting dedicated followers.
This can only be accomplished by Tweeting helpful, useful, interesting information to your followers.
Tweeting can gain an insight into a business owner’s personality, their likes and their dislikes. This information can be extremely beneficial in building your credibility and strong business relationships.
Don’t destroy your credibility and start promoting your website until you have a sizable number of interested followers.
Be yourself and when you think you’ve got enough followers to bring a reasonable amount of traffic to your business’ website, then start promoting.
People who promote their sites right out of the box often get labeled as a spammer.
If you have a business blog, tweet about every new blog posts or about your personal take on an article.
Share your personal opinion with your followers and encourage your followers to do the same through mentions and personal replies.
- Link your sites for maximum exposure.
Encourage your Twitter followers to share your insights on Facebook, YouTube and any other social networking sites you frequent.
Share your links with your followers and let them know you’re ready to do business with anyone at any time.
When you’re Tweeting for traffic, you can also find out who’s twittering about you, your company and your website, by signing up for a free service called TweetBeep.
Tweet Beep will send you an email alert, updated hourly, whenever someone mentions your name, your website, your company product, or anything else. Tweet Beep even tracks who is Tweeting your website or blog for you.
It’s a great way to monitor and measure your business blog or business website’s “buzz factor”.
Tweeting for traffic will redirect a tremendous amount of traffic to your business website when you implement these suggestions.
Learning how often to post to your blog is a variable that comes with experience.
Until a new blog has been indexed and has a considerable amount of good usable content, it’s probably a good idea to post at least once a day. Many bloggers post up to ten times a day when first starting out.
From that point on, you should post only when you have something to say that will be of interest to your readers.
Too many blogs online simply mirror other blogs in the same market niche and incessantly repeat what others have already written about.
My dad always said, “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it.”
This advise can be used by bloggers to effectively build their readership and improve their standing in the blogosphere.
Many so called gurus tell you that “you don’t have to be perfect” and to “just put something up there”.
While this is an accepted strategy for getting the search engines interested in your site, it’s not really a great strategy for attracting and increasing a targeted readership.
Don’t publish a post unless it’s really good and then make it short, sweet and to the point. Although multiple blog posts will get you more traffic, they can also lose you readers.
Bloggers who love writing and sharing information with their readers usually produce effective blogs that stand the test of time.
Here are some variables you should take under advisement when considering how often to post to your blog.
How long are your blog posts?
The length of your blog posts will often dictate the frequency of your posts. More short blog posts can be written in the same amount of time that it takes to write one long post.
Since most of the top bloggers write shorter, more easily digestible posts than the average blogger, it stands to reason that short posts should be the order of the day.
However, how often to post to your blog does not necessarily mean that you need to make all your posts short.
The downside to making short blog posts is that your followers will spend less time reading them. This means they will spend less time on your blog.
Making worthwhile medium to long blog posts on your site that provide useful, interesting information, is probably the better path to follow.
Writer burnout also affects how often to post to your blog.
Bloggers who consistently provide relevant top quality content in their blog posts will eventually suffer from “writer burnout”.
Unless you have a staff of writers coming up with new material for your blog, everyone will experience writer burnout at some time or another.
The quality of your writing and how often to post to your blog is obviously affected by writer burnout.
Reader burnout also affects how often to post to your blog.
Writing too many short posts in a relatively short period of time can leave even the most loyal of your followers in a burned out state.
Too many posts can cause readers to “turn off” from your blog.
It’s like getting tons of emails in your inbox on a daily basis.
After a time, you learn to just scan the subject line in order to keep up with the volume. Then, after a while, you become so overwhelmed that you just “opt out”.
If your followers can’t keep up with the volume of posts you make to your site, especially with RSS feeds, it could cause readers to unsubscribe from your blog.
Strive to keep a happy medium between the volume and length of your posts.
Remember that the Search Engine spiders don’t really qualify the quality of a blog posting. They simply come when a blog is posted to and include the information in their algorithms.
Frequent posts will generally create more traffic, usually via RSS, to your blog.
Find your blogging rhythm and be consistent.
Most readers don’t respond positively to a monotonous writing tone. They will respond to how well your write and how often you post.
People do not like change.
Most people have a rhythm in their lives and will not vary from it to any great degree.
They lead their lives in tune with this rhythm and will read your blog posts when it is convenient and fits into their time frame.
This is why you should maintain a steady flow of content once you start.
If you blog once a day or once a week, maintain the pace.
Your followers will not respond well if you start blogging three or four times a day when you had been blogging once or twice a week.
Stick to a schedule if possible to maintain a steady flow of useful information. There is no “one size fits all” answer when learning how often to post to your blog.
The type of visitors you attract to your blog is dictated by the topic of your blog.
Most technical information junkies like frequent postings of fresh new information.
A blog catering to technical information will usually have more initial traffic generated from the search engines on that particular topic.
In this case, how often to post to your blog is not a critical factor.
A high volume of short posts can actually be beneficial in creating more landing pages for your search engine traffic.
Blogging Styles
The topic of a blog usually dictates the blogging style to be used.
Technical blogs that cover a wide variety of topics require a high volume of posts in order to cover all the material.
These tech savvy readers are able to consume large amounts of technical information, expect and readily anticipate the high volumes of shorter posts that are required to cover the subject.
On a fishing blog that has a more focused topic, a large volume of posts would be unnecessary and impossible to maintain without becoming monotonous.
There is just so much that can be written in any given day about fishing.
How often to post to your blog also depends on reader participation.
When too many posts are made to a blog, readers have a tendency to “burn out”.
However as blog traffic diminishes, reader participation in the form of comments often goes up.
Depending on the topic, comments often become more productive and interactive when posts are made less frequently.
This could be because of the amount of time the post is visible on the front page of the blog or because people just can’t keep up with or follow many different threads of conversation at one time.
Regardless of the reason, when you write too many posts on too many topics, people will start to disengage.
Make enough posts to your blog to stimulate reader participation without harming the amount of web traffic you are receiving.
Learning how often to post to your blog requires common sense and is an important variable that comes with experience.
