Internet Marketing Insider

Do you use pay per click (PPC) advertising? If not, it may be because you don’t understand its purpose. Let us help you out.

In a nutshell, PPC marketing is essentially paying the major search engines to advertise your website or blog on their search engine results page and paying them a small fee every time someone clicks on your advertisement. Once a search engine user clicks on your advertisement link, they are directed to your website or blog. That click to your site can cost you just a few pennies, up to a few dollars or more. 

So, you ask, why would I want to do this? Well, for a few reasons.

• PPC advertising is the fastest way to get traffic to your site (you don’t have to wait for search engines to list your new site (can take weeks).
• PPC advertising also is a nearly endless stream of traffic, depending on how you structure your PPC campaign.
• PPC campaigns are easily justified if you sell a product that justifies the expenditure. If you structure the campaign correctly, it can provide very targeted traffic for you.  

For a great article on how to create a PPC campaign that works the best for you and produces cost-effective, targeted traffic, click here.

If you have a business that caters to a local market, a local listing in the major search engines is the ticket for you.

You may be a pizzeria owner, a dry cleaner, a real estate agent, or a piano teacher. If the nature of your business restricts you to serving a local geography, then your marketing should focus on that local market. Advertising on Google and getting people to find your business that may be three states away is a waste of marketing dollars,

Google local, and Yahoo local are the geographically oriented parts of the two major search engines.  One of the recent trends with the search engines is that the public that uses these search engines for research are starting to understand the real value of local search. Getting tired of getting search results for the kinds of businesses they need that are 2,000 miles away, has prompted many folks to move to local search.

Speedy Sites recommends that you go to Yahoo’s local search and Google’s local search and take five minutes to submit your business to Yahoo or Google local. You’ll need to set up a free account with Google to use the local service.

Entering your business in local search will provide more in-bound links to your website, create more exposure for your business and best of all – it’s free!

The Internet is loaded with “directories”. These directories are intended to aid the visitor in finding a website that meets their needs. They list other websites in categories, making the search for just the right site a breeze. Many of these directories are specific to certain niches, such as website development, Internet marketing, sports, business to business, eBooks, etc. Hundreds of these directories offer a no cost option for listing your site.

To find a directory for the niche market you are in, type “niche website directory”, where “niche” is the name of your niche market – real estate, soccer, accouning, computers, etc.

Speedy Sites has had good luck in submitting our website to the no cost directories and getting valuable one-way links back to the Speedy Sites website. These one-way links are invaluable when it comes to search engine optimization.

We have found a program called Directory Submitter that speeds up the submittal process by orders of magnitude, compared to manual, hand submittal. This program can allow you to submit your website to 30 or more directories in an hour’s work!

Please have a look at the program in more detail by clicking here. They have a full-featured, free version to get you started on your first 300 directories! Results start showing up in a week or so.

 

If your business is located in the great state of Michigan, we know of a great directory that we can tell you about that is dedicated to Michigan businesses and gets great traffic. Email us on this page, tell us you want to know more about the Michigan business directory and we’ll tell you all about it!

The staff at Speedy Sites thanks you for visiting the Internet Marketing (IM) Insider!

The IM Insider will provide the small and medium business owner insight into the low-cost and no-cost methods to promote your website, sell your products, develop your brand image and almost anything else that allows you to “TAKE YOUR STORY TO THE WORLD“! Look for more information in the coming days that will help your business get to where you want to be.

We welcome your thoughts and hope you’ll share them here. Heck, we certainly plan to share!