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By Mark Daoust
The cornerstone sites of your marketing campaign must remain consistent. Their consistency will add to their long term effectiveness. No matter what new advertising opportunities arise, do not let anything jeopardize these cornerstone ads. The consistent success of these ads will allow you to grow your marketing campaign further, even including advertising that previously would have caused your campaign to sputter and trap you in the bad habit of burst marketing.
Search engine marketing is often the best place to begin building a marketing campaign. Because search engines send keyword driven traffic to your website, they tend to provide some of the greatest results available. In addition, it is possible to run a very low cost search engine marketing campaign. As you build your marketing campaign, you will want to start with only the search engines that provide the greatest return on your initial investment.
Pay per click search engines (PPC Search Engines) are a great source of quality traffic. Popular PPC search engines are Overture (http://www.overture.com), Google Ad Words (http://www.google.com/ads/), and Kanoodle (http://www.kanoodle.com). Due to the competitive nature of bidding on keywords, pay per click search engines can be quite expensive. For this reason, we encourage website owners to first look to pay per click alternatives.
PPC alternatives are search engines that offer advertiser services similar to traditional PPC’s, but do not come with the high PPC cost. The most recognizable PPC alternative is TowerSearch (http://www.towersearch.com/add/add.htm). TowerSearch invites advertisers to list their site under the keywords they choose while guaranteeing that their listings will show at the top of their results. Instead of charging their clients on a per click basis, however, TowerSearch charges a low flat monthly fee, regardless of how many targeted clicks are delivered. TowerSearch is a great resource to start a marketing campaign as the cost of running a campaign is consistent month to month, the results are highly targeted, and will ultimately grow with your website. Another quality PPC alternative is ExactSeek Priority Listings (http://exactseek.com/add_priority.html). As a free alternative to pay per click search engines, ExacktSeek increases a websites ranking in their search engine based on the amount of traffic sent to them. With priority listings, the more traffic you send, the more “credits” you receive from ExactSeek, and the better positioning you have in their search engine.
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