|
By Mark Daoust
Most webmasters are not getting the most from their online advertising as they fall into the trap of burst marketing. What they don't realize is that the best marketing is consistent marketing.
If you have a website, chances are you have fallen victim to burst marketing (and thus wasted valuable money).
The natural inclination for most website owners is to advertise only in the most recognized places, such as highly visible websites, recognized industry leaders, expensive pay per click search engines, or other expensive off-line venues. Spending a large amount of money in a very concentrated form, they hope to realize a return with the only a few untested advertisements. This is burst marketing, the practice of website owners to market their websites in short, expensive, and usually ineffective bursts.
Although burst marketing will probably produce some results, it does not allow website owners to properly build a good marketing campaign. A good marketing campaign is built over time, marked with consistency, steadiness, and friendly to a company’s cash flow. A good marketing campaign should grow with the business, in size, expenditure, reach, and net results. In the early stages of building a marketing campaign, website owners should look for low-cost, high-return venues that can remain constant from month to month. As the website grows, the marketing campaign can build off this foundation of low-cost, high-impact, consistent marketing by adding advertisements to websites that have a high visibility (and more expensive ads), but not necessarily an immediate positive return. What is important is that a consistent foundation be built BEFORE purchasing a more expensive short-lived, untested advertising spot.
When building your marketing campaign, begin by developing a list of potential advertising venues. Include everything from well recognized sites to lesser known but still relevant websites to your industry. The goal is to spread your monthly advertising budget across several websites instead of one or two websites where the results are unproven for your website. By advertising across several different websites, you will find a few sites that produce much greater returns than their initial costs. These sites should be become the cornerstones of your marketing campaign. Of course, there will be other websites that do not produce results for you. These sites should be discontinued from your monthly advertising.
|
