ADVERTISING YOUR SITE

• Search Engines

• Banners

• Link Programs

There are some forms of advertising that are unique to the internet.  This section discusses only a few of them.

Some other ways to market your site are newsgroups, e-mail lists, press releases, on-site promotions, e-newsletters, etc.  If you would like information on some of these other options, we suggest that go to your favorite search engine and do a search specifically on these topics.

Three sites in particular that give a good overview of some of the marketing options available are http://submitit.com/siprimer.htm,   http://www.bcentral.com/marketing/default.asp, and http://wilsonweb.com/webmarket/promote.htm.  If you are specifically interested in newsgroups, you may also want to visit http://www.deja.com.

And don't forget to integrate you e-marketing with your traditional marketing methods.  Include your web address on your letterhead, business cards, brochures, flyers, newspaper or TV ads, and of course your yellow pages listing, if you have one. 

Search Engines

"If you build it they will come" may have been true in the movie Field of Dreams, but it certainly isn't true on the internet.

One of the first things you need to do once your site is established is to get it listed by the search engines.  And this is not necessarily a small task, since there are thousands of search engines, announcement sites, and general as well as specific directories (relating to specific industries, interests, geographic areas, etc. ) out there.  But you at least want to make sure your site is listed with the major search engines,  such as yahoo, alta vista, infoseek, excite, goto, lycos, google, web crawler, hotbot, northernlight.

You will also want to resubmit your site whenever you make significant additions or changes, or redefine your keywords or site description.

To read more about search engines and how they do their job, see Registering your Site with Search Engines on our Establishing Your Web Site page.  

Banners

Banners are graphics or images displayed on a web site, usually at the top of a page, that are used to advertise and link to another web site. Often banners are animated.

Besides the cost of the banner itself, which can range from free, if you make your own banner, to $60 on up, depending on who does the design work, the major expense for banner advertising is the cost per impression, not the cost of the banner.

An impression is the number of times the banner is actually displayed.  Impressions are usually sold on a cost per thousand basis, but they may also be purchased on a per lead, per sale, or per click-thru basis.  The latter three are generally more expensive, but usually more cost effective, since they are results-based.

There are also Banner Exchange Programs that you may want to consider, where the amount of free advertising you receive is directly proportional to the number of times that other members' ads are displayed on your site.  

Banner impressions can be either general, running randomly across various web sites, and displayed whenever the site with the banner is visited, or impressions may be targeted.  Targeted impressions are more expensive, but they are selectively displayed, based on criteria you specify.  Hence, they can be directed or "targeted" to the people who are specifically in the market for the product or service you offer.  Targeted impressions may be based on keywords you specify, that is the banner is displayed only when those specific keywords are searched for, or they may be directed toward specific root domains (.com, .net, .edu, etc.), specific geographic areas, etc.  Targeted impressions usually produce better results than untargeted.

Good banner ads may generate 2-4% visitor click-though.

To find out more about Banner Programs, you may want to visit http://www.bcentral.com/bws/marketing3.asp.  Also, if you're interested in free banners or logos, go to http://www.webgfx.ch/titlepic.htm, where you can make your own.

Link Programs

Links from other sites to your site can be an effective way to generate traffic.  These links can also increase the "perceived popularity" of your site, and gain your site a higher ranking with the search engines that use link frequency as one of the criteria for ranking sites.

One of the most straightforward ways to get a link on another site is to find a complementary site, and actually ask them to link to you.  This may be a site that deals with your industry, an association your business belongs to, a site that offers related products or services, or a site where the material you present can be of benefit, or complements the material offered on the other site.

As with banners, there are also Web Ring and Link Exchange Programs, where members reciprocally place links on each others sites.

To find out more about Link Programs, you may want to visit www.bcentral.com. 

Please contact us with any questions or comments.