Making the most of your promotional budget29 April 2005
Once you've invested in setting up and maintaining your web site, it's important to get the most out it by spending your online promotional budget wisely.
It can be difficult figuring out where to spend money and what to avoid when there are so many different forms of online advertising. Here's a list of issues to consider when deciding where to spend your annual or monthly promotional budget.
1. Free search engine submission
Many aspects of search engine marketing are free. It may be free to submit your site for a basic listing in a search engine, for example - see Add Me as an example. And the best way to improve your ranking is by optimising your site to appeal to the search engine spiders that will look for it. Much of this can be done for free, by choosing the right keywords and having a content-rich site with plenty of incoming links.
2. Paid search engine submission
There are also premium ways to boost your search engine ranking. Paid submission services submit your site more regularly to greater numbers of search engines, and create detailed ranking reports to help you track your campaign.
3. Pay-per-click advertising
With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you pay a fee that is calculated according to the number of clicks, or visits, generated by your listing. There are many different PPC programmes available, with fees determined by the ranking you achieve or the keywords you use. For example, Google's AdWords is the PPC programme offered by Google. Even if you're ranking well on your chosen search engine, it is often worth pursuing PPC campaigns to gain extra exposure.
4. Email marketing lists
If you want to promote your web site by email, buying a list of addresses helps you save time, and those categorised by business sector or location will help you focus on a particular target group. See Marketing File and Business Mailing as examples, and don't forget to check your lists against the E-mail Preference Service to make sure you are complying with anti-spam legislation.
Save money by developing a strategy for capturing the names and email addresses of visitors to your site, so that you can build your own targeted list of potential customers.
5. Web site design
Spending money on professional web site design is critical to the ultimate success of your site in attracting traffic and turning visitors into paying customers. Issues such as accessibility, how easy the site is to navigate and how long it takes to load the pages will play a part in determining how effective your site is.
It's not worth investing a lot of money in paid search engine advertising and email lists if the site people are directed to is unappealing, inaccessible or unusable. See the UK Web Design Association for a directory of reputable designers.
Finally, don't forget about the multitude of ways that you can promote your web site without spending a penny. These include viral marketing techniques such as giving away free articles or factsheets that have links back to your site; blogging; installing a tell-a-friend script on your web pages, and many more - see Web Marketing Today for extra ideas.
