You have a great site and it’s getting some web traffic, but you want to increase your market visibility quickly, effectively, and in the most cost-efficient way. It’s time to do some Internet marketing, but where to start? A great first step is utilizing advertising networks. But there are nearly as many advertising networks out there as there are web sites, so whom should you use? While the opportunities are nearly endless, your budget may dictate limits. In this article, I will discuss a few of the primarily ad networks and give you the information you need—before you spend your precious advertising dollars.

In writing these reviews, I gathered data and information both my personal current dealings with each network and an informal focus group of small and medium-sized businesses. Each network was tested by at least two different industries for 60 days or more. While informative, this approach was hardly scientific, so consider this information as a guide and not a rulebook. After all, each industry campaign and ad network will experience different levels of success, so your experience may be different.

For each individual advertising network I will be focusing on the Spending & Competition, Ease of Use, and Customer Service. Additionally, we also created pros and cons for each of the networks we are reviewing. The advertising networks we reviewed are a few of the largest and most well known:

Google AdWords Review

Google is a monster of a company, spanning the globe with numerous tools and resources for any type of business. Not just a search engine, but we are talking email, documents and spreadsheets, maps, and the list continues to grow every year. As Google receives about 85% of the worldwide search market share, most people normally go here first.

Spending & Competition

This is where it gets complicated. Because of Google’s extensive reach, competition by keyword in the Google network can be fierce (depending on the type of product or service). Because of this competition, you can spend a big chunk of change for your ad, and only get a handful of click throughs—meaning general searches will potentially cost you as much as $55.00 a click or more. It’s like giving everyone who visits your site a gift certificate for a nice dinner—without them making a purchase or even promising to visit your site again! It is often a more cost-effective approach to research less common and more subject-specific “niche” keywords to describe your product to decrease your competition using Googles extensive keyword search tools.

Ease of Use

Here is where Google really shines—it’s so simple my 4 year old daughter could do it! It is very simple to create an account, and is by far the easiest network with which to coordinate your campaigns. There is a very expansive FAQ section and help guide, and the extensive forums and chat rooms filled with like-minded business owners that are happy to offer you advice and share experiences can’t be beat—and backed with analytics and cross-channel marketing, this networking tool is a top notch service.

Customer Service

Google employs some of the nicest people I have ever chatted with/spoken to. Whether I had a general question, billing concern, or a question on how items operate, my questions were answered perfectly—both by phone, email, or chat. However, they cannot currently help you optimize your marketing goals on the phone. They have optimizer tools to help maximize your campaign potential, and reports they can send you with advice on how to improve, but offering this type of service will probably understandably never happen.

Pros and Cons of Google Adwords

Pros

• Extensive number of tools and resources that can provide a complete and detailed marketing picture
• Easy to set up conversion tracking and multiple campaign testing
• Very smart machine that will rotate the best performing ads and keywords

Cons

• On more than one occasion, the companies polled all noticed the level of customer service changed depending on how much you spent. Those businesses who spent small amounts monthly were offered only email support, while those with large spends had email and IM chat help.
• Can be very expensive, depending on the market.
• With all advertising networks, once the money stops coming in, so does the traffic.

Every Wednesday I will be passing along a few links from other Internet Marketing related sites that I find extremely useful. The articles will vary in detail, subject matter, and complexity. Please let me know if anyone has an interesting tip or article to share that will benefit the site and the readers.

WordPress 3.0 Upgrade: What to Expect

Before upgrading to the Thelonius update, here is a few items to get you prepared for the switch. All in all the upgrade is pretty painless. I have upgraded 5 of my sites with little error or bugs. For the amount of features the 3.0 upgrade offers, it is well worth the bit of headache the website may cause on your site. Read more to find out what exactly to expect…

PPC Blog Infographic

The folks at PPC Blog were kind enough to let us distribute this on our website. This is a perfect high-line understanding of how the Google Search Engine works. Read this for a better understanding of what is done with your website or blog after you hit “Publish”. Click the image to view to full version. It is very infomative for those people just getting into Search Marketing.

Google Apps Highlights 6/18/2010

A few days late, but this Google Blog post highlights some very exciting changes for Google Apps across the board. Pay REAL IMPORTANT attention to this snippet:

Blogger Template Designer available to all
Back in March we introduced Blogger Template Designer in Blogger in Draft, and last week we made it available to everyone. You can choose from more than 19 stock templates and further customize your design with hundreds of free, professional background images, custom color schemes and pixel-perfect layout manipulation. Customizing your blog and making it “your own” is now much easier.

Now it is easier than ever to make a fancy, unique looking Blogger site. Exciting!

The concept of the Pay Per Click form of advertising is one of the most common marketing practices on the Internet. The concept is quite simple; a user clicks on a link or ad banner which transports him to the website that sponsored the link/a banner. The sponsor pays to the website which generated the traffic. The process also works for search engines where advertisers can have paid links which appear on specific SERP; in this case advertiser is essentially paying for the keyword.

There are two primary financial models which determine the PPC – flat fee or bidding. The flat fee as the name suggests, the advertiser and the portal agree for a fixed cost per click. Whereas for the bid model, more prevalent in search engines, the advertiser has to bid for a keyword and compete with other advertisers eyeing the same keyword.

PPC is quite an expensive marketing strategy. Therefore it is important to analyse a return on the investment from these strategies against the objectives. In the initial stage there is a surge in traffic after launching with a PPC campaign. But is this sustainable in the long run? The company is spending money to gain users in a short turn around time and therefore it has to continue to spend money to maintain the growth. However not all companies can afford such high costs for a lengthy period of time.

Discover the Alternatives to Pay Per Click Marketing

The objective has clearly set the strategy in motion. And it brings us to an effective implementation of search engine optimization and link building. These two methods that create a perfect long-term impact on web traffic. However, before we get into the implementation it is important to know that both these methods do come at a cost (though certainly not as high as a PPC campaign). The link building/SEO requires a team of people to work together. They are essentially looking to use the various SEO and link building strategies to drive traffic to the site.

The team will have content writers, link builders, search engine optimizers and online marketing experts. The idea is to build a site through grass-root level marketing across the web. Look at various online marketing channels to grow the websites ranking or visibility on search engines. It is a known fact that majority of web traffic is generated through search engines and therefore the high visibility is mission critical. Not only does the visibility of the site on search engines have to increase but equally important is to maintain that high visibility.

The optimization can be done through article submission at various sites and directories, email marketing, social networking site visibility and reciprocal links. The process also includes banner ad purchases. But the banner ads are not purchased as an online media blitz but a well thought out / precision based strategy. The strategy can be aided by the SEO team who know the current trends on online marketing based on their experience. This synergy is of immense importance to companies without major ad budgets.

Opportunities/Possibilities

The bad news first – the process of establishing the websites required traffic takes time. The team has to be monitored and driven as it is not a one-time implementation. The results may take a little bit of time show but they do show!

Now for the good news – huge cost savings, sustainable growth and it opens a brand new area of online opportunity for products and services.