What Are Advertising Basics Online?
The most common question asked by those who are marketing products or services online is this, “How do I get traffic to my blog or landing page?” Here at PERSONAL DEVELOPERS, we will guide you about the correct ways to set up attractive blogs, squeeze (landing) pages and even elaborate sales funnels.
Why you may ask? Because if you have an inspiring message or idea that you would like to get out into the world, we will show you how!
But let’s face it. No matter how beautiful your initial page is that you want your prospects to see, it will do you no good without traffic. Or so they say.
First, it is important to understand that there are three types of traffic:
- Traffic You Control
- Traffic You Do Not Control
- Traffic You Own
Traffic That You Own:
So, what is the difference? The differences are the most important! The goal is always to “own” your traffic. This means, that you get people to sign onto your email list by way of a squeeze page or landing page. (Also known as an “opt-in” page or “lead magnet” page.)
Once they sign up onto your list, they are then sent to an email autoresponder where they will begin receiving a series of emails from you. If this is accomplished, then you now “own” your list (or traffic.) By the way, I really wish the dictionary would make “autoresponder” a word because when editing, it bothers the heck out of OCD people like me.
Owning traffic can be of high quality or low quality. For example, if you are attracting a long line of “lookers” or curiosity seekers or people who are just looking for free stuff, then this would be considered a low-quality list, at least until they decide to actually buy something from you.
On the other hand, if they have purchased something from you, then this is considered a list of “buyers,” which (as you can imagine), is much, much more valuable! At this point, you can continue to sell to them over and over again.
Traffic That You Do Not Control:
The two ways to get traffic on your list (so that you will now “own” them) is through traffic that you can control and traffic that you do not control. Traffic that you do not control normally comes to your site by way of 
a blog or social media.
In other words, they see something that grabs their attention and they check your site out. These people may or may not be buyers and this is called “Inbound Traffic.”
They can come to your business by way of a blog article or through social media. So, how do blog articles attract people to your business? They do this by way of keywords.
One of the best advertising techniques is the importance of noting that the most popular keywords are not necessarily the best keywords unless you want to pay top dollar! Examples of that would be:
- Internet Marketing
- Dog Training
- Weight Loss
- Make Money From Home
Unless you are able to compete with very large companies who have been around for a long time, those types of keywords will leave you so far buried in the search engines that no one will ever see you! The good news is that you can drill down your keywords, find words that are considered “long tailed keywords” or “buyer keywords,” and you have a much better chance of getting people to find you in the search engines.
The next type of traffic that you cannot control is through free social media. As you probably know, this can be successful once a huge following is built up over time, but just like building a blog, these things take time. They can be very successful, as well as affordable, but you would need to let them run their course. In the meantime, you would need to write a lot of articles, research keywords and work your business along with new content on a regular basis.
Traffic That You Do Control:
Traffic that you control, on the other hand, is traffic that you can acquire through paid advertising. This is what many of the well established and highly successful and marketers do. The problem is that most people are very afraid of paying money to advertise. They feel like it is a gamble, and what if they lose?
That is a smart concern. That is why they track everything that they do. This type of traffic is called “Outbound Traffic.”
Once you learn how to figure out where successful people are actually getting their traffic (and where they are advertising), then you can go to those same places and advertise too!
What if you could find out which sites are performing well and making money, where they are advertising and even better, how long their ads have been running? If you can find out that an ad has been running for a long time with a company that is performing well on the internet, odds are that these ads are working!
Testing, Tracking and Ramping Up Advertising:
These marketers definitely do have their strategies for the best advertising techniques. For one thing, they test, track and split test their ads.
In other words, they will create two or more blog articles or landing pages and test everything! They will test the headline until they figure out which one is working. Then, they will run two more and test the sub-headline. Then, they will test the videos, the bullets, the opt-in or buy-now buttons and more.
Highly successful marketers are testing everything! They don’t gamble! And they are usually doing this by starting out with small advertising budgets.
Once they find winning combinations, they ramp up their advertising budget (also known as “scaling it up”,) and they start putting $1.00 in to get $2.00 back out. Who wouldn’t want that deal? If you could get two dollars back for every one dollar you put in, what would your advertising budget be? There would be none!!
Some of the top internet marketers claim that money actually does grow on trees, and they know how to get it. They call these trees “ad campaigns.”
Other forms of paid advertising would be through paid Facebook ads, paid YouTube ads, Google PPC (pay per click), Bing PPC (pay per click) and so on. People also advertise through solo ads (advertising on other marketer’s established email lists.)
Other methods of paid advertising are banner ads on established blog or ezines, and just about any other place where people “hang out.”
The Final Goal:
But here’s when things really get profitable for marketers. After they have spent all of that time testing, tracking and driving traffic to the email list (through traffic they control or traffic they do not control), then they can begin marketing to that list and that costs ZERO.
Are you beginning to see the big picture? They have established a following of raving fans!
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What are your favorite advertising techniques? Please share in the comments below!