Serious Marketing Guide

The Internet is a ubiquitous Corporate communications and sales channel, however many companies are still not utilizing much of its power.

That could be because of loyalties to comfortable old channels or that there aren’t enough Internet marketing experts to take their brands into the digital realm. Regardless of the hold-ups in leveraging internal or external Internet communications options, consumer and B2B channels are growing their share of the market. Resistance is futile and with this change in how consumers and B2B buyers are reached, is a change in the symbolism, voice, and style of promoting brands. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Internet can’t play a supporting role for your offline or TV advertising.

For many campaigns, the Internet is just another conduit for sales videos and corporate brochures. Some are satisfied with this, however the Internet’s own power to communicate and generate business shouldn’t be underestimated. The Internet, whether through public Web sites, search engines, Internet radio broadcasts, and e-mail are very targeted. It is shown to reach the right target at the right time with the right message. It doesn’t matter whether you use a Web friendly, or search engine friendly approach to your online advertising and promotion. You need to be there anyway you can. It’s too important to let it slide.

Internet branding is a term in increasing usage because branding can be adapted to be effective on the Internet. That’s different from broadcasting your TV video ad or showing your marketing brochure on your Web site. With Internet branding, you’re taking into consideration that viewers have searched around and seen many other products similar to yours. They may have reviewed many more product or service features than they would think about while watching television or casually reading a magazine. Your customer’s context then is different. The splashy video display generally isn’t there and surprisingly, few people are interested in seeing it. They’re pressured for time and want to find what they’re looking for. If you understand their quest for knowledge, you can better shape your value proposition and even your sales pitch.

Active Internet Positioning

The Internet appears to be a passive marketing environment, but it’s actually very active. To stay one step ahead of the elusive customer, you have to continually position your products and Web site to meet their needs ahead of time. An Internet marketing expert helps to tell you where people are going ahead of time. You may even position your brand better with this knowledge.

Customers loyalty

You have returning customers whose loyalty you want to build and you have new prospects coming in searching and enquiring about different things. It’s not easy to position a brand to meet all those needs. There are experts in the field who can help you understand Web visitors and help you build powerful Corporate Internet Branding strategies. It’s easy to say you’ll advertise to reach all the same prospects you did with your TV campaigns, but Internet audiences are different.

Advertising, such as search engine advertising can be expensive

You may not be able to afford to reach those same people. That means you may have to plan a way to reach particular segments of that audience with more specific features and benefits. Only after you bring them to your Web site and established credibility with respect to the product they’re inquiring about, will you be able to present your corporate brand. Corporate branding is powerful today and Corporate Internet Branding even more so. You can introduce products more quickly and even reposition them more effectively. People see corporate brands all the time though and are not necessarily impressed that your corporate brand will make this particular product relevant to them.

For instance, just because Nike makes golf equipment doesn’t mean their “big mammoth driver” is the right one. The corporate logo won’t be enough and forcing the brand on them isn’t going to make them buy it. Search Marketing Instead, Internet branding strategies, particularly those that deliver targeted visitors to your Web site, ensure your establish credibility and relevance. Remember that Web visitors are in an intense state of consciousness. They’re very often looking for something specific. If you want to get anywhere on the Web as a user, you have to have an idea of what you want, or you’ll sit frustrated in front of your computer. Television and magazines are very different. The channels and pages in these mediums are limited and the prospect is captured. Not on the Internet. There are billions of web pages and hundreds of millions of Web sites.

With search engines, consumers can get help finding what they’re looking for. High ranking sites get first crack at these motivated/directed consumers. Your corporate Internet marketing strategy should be heavily involved in search engine visibility. It is an opportunity to present your site many different ways to many different types of consumers. The potential reach is further enhanced because you have International reach and the cost of entry is so minimal. Searchers are looking for quick solutions too. They’re not looking for fancy graphics and complicated menus that fly out all over the place. They’re looking for specific things about your products and services. Here, you have a low cost of adapting your brand imagery and communications to suit each group of visitors. Generally, it just takes another Web page designed and written for that group of consumers. You can fashion your homepage to let current customers get to what they’re looking for as well. After these searchers have found your products and services relevant to their search, your corporate brand will then have the power to make the sale and establish brand loyalty.

Intelligent corporate Internet Branding adapts to the consumer

It de-massifies to serve each person as they arrive; yet it still delivers the corporate brand communication at the right time after the visitor is satisfied. Rather than a boastful in your face confrontation with the consumer, your corporate image becomes a helpful one and is relevant and timely. You get credit for being there when they needed you.

We’ve all seen the hype surrounding AdSense, contextual advertising on your web site, and heard the stories of people banking thousands from this groundbreaking concept. But… for every person banking $1,000’s there are many, many more who are banking less than $50 per month. There are many reasons for this so let’s examine a few.  Value of the ads – despite the hype over the high paying keywords, many keyword pay only a few cents to the advertiser (that’s you). The high paying keywords are fiercely fought over by both bidders and advertisers. That’s a fierce arena for someone with little experience and little traffic to their site. So forget about throwing up a “meso” or credit web site and then sitting back and banking your new found fortune. That is probably not going to happen.  Your business model – there are two ways to profit from AdSense – a few web sites with loads of traffic or numerous web sites with average traffic.

The concept is the same as with any business – it’s “bums on seats” or “people through the door” that make the money. Looking at the first model – plainly the problem is to get many interested people to your web site – preferably those seeking information so that if they don’t find it on your site, they click on one of your ads and move onto another site – leaving you with a few cents as they leave you.

Traffic

Traffic, as any internet marketer will tell you, is not only the life blood of your business, but is also very expensive and time consuming to build up. Shouldn’t you be looking at capturing emails for your mailing list or selling them something rather than letting them go leaving you a few cents in tips. Of course if you merely look at AdSense as a secondary income, then these few cents are more than welcome.

Pile it high

Let’s look now at the second model – the pile it high concept. You need numerous very large sites, all attracting high paying words with thousands of pages, to make a good living with AdSense. There is a place for this, and indeed we sell large batches of densely keyworded AdSense article sites ourselves – because we know they work. But… here is the problem. In order to make them work – you need not only a lot of domain names, but also a serious amount of hosting and we are talking paid hosting, not the no cost stuff. Many packs sold have over 100 sites and tens of thousands of pages. 100 sites means 100 domains – that is about $1,000 a year and a lot of time finding good ones. Of course you could use sub domains, but then you have problems getting them all into the search engines and pay per click advertising. 10,000+ pages and 100 domains – that’s a server you need to rent, be it virtual or actual. That is serious money each month – and you have still not earned a dime! You have to earn a serious number of click thrus to cover your annual and monthly fees.

The ads themselves – just as banners are no way as effective as they once were, then surfers are growing weary of AdSense ads. This is especially so of those ugly sites that just throw up the maximum 3 sets of ads in the default colors, not caring if they are messy and detract from the site. Many of these sites contain minimal information and are spoiling it for those that make much more effort with their internet business. Google knows it has a cash cow and a virtual monopoly with the AdSense business, I can’t see it letting this happen for too much longer, but sadly it will take a long time to clear up and, as this happens, surfers will get more and more immune to the ads. It’s not as if you can encourage your visitors to use the links, or disguise the ads, or even place graphics around them – all forbidden by the Google Terms of Service. So what can you do to keep making a secondary income from your web sites? Well if you want to stay with Google and why not? Then; understand that it is a business and be prepared to spend out on advertising, test your product, refine your web site, tailor your advert design to your web site and lastly offer good value to your surfers.

Lastly look elsewhere – we found a great software program that lets you provide contextual adverts on your web site derived from the 1,000’s of high commission paying products in ClickBank.

The beauty is that you can merge these ads into your web site, draw attention to them, encourage people to click on them and add graphics to them. Better than that, although you don’t get paid when someone clicks on the ads, your Clickbank name is added to the link, so if someone buys from the powerful sales page you send them to, you make a very large commission – up to about $75 from some sites? So AdSense is a great system, but what about looking at other methods? – Just a thought!

With over 20 year’s management and business consultancy experience with businesses large and small as well as being a serial entrepreneur, she now helps others set up, develop and market their businesses. If you are intrigued about this new software then go to our site www.clikkads.com – if you want to build your AdSense Empire then have a look at www.AdSenseSites.biz This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.