Marbella SEO

The excitement associated with starting your own internet business is often matched with the frustrations of trying to make it successful. Getting quality traffic to our site is the first thing we all focus on.

Your excitement level can often overcome your ability to think in a business like manner. You want instant success and you want to start making money. These desires drive you to consider the fastest ways to advertise your business, and not necessarily the best ways.

Anytime we set up advertising campaigns without planning what we want to accomplish, we are working blindly. To illustrate this, let’s assume that John, a pet gate business owner, is a first timer in the online work from home world, and  is setting up his first Google advertising campaign.

John does a great job of writing his first ad. He identifies the benefits of his pet gates and chooses ten very relative keywords. John is so excited that he tracks the campaign results every hour. His first setback is that his keyword bids seem to be too low, so he isn’t getting any clicks. John doesn’t let this stop him, so he doubles his bids.

With the higher bids, John begins to get a good flow of daily traffic to his website. After several days, John has received 200 visitors, but none of them have made a purchase. His advertising costs have reached $250.

I’m sure many of us have experienced this, I know that I have, so what just happened? 
a)    his expectations were unrealistic
b)    he had no advertising plan
c)    he had no clear advertising budget
d)    he had no form of measurement
e)    he had absolutely no idea why he wasn’t getting any sales

The first lesson of advertising is that you should never start any campaign unless your are very clear about your expectations. You need a benchmark to measure your success against. If you are going to spend money, you need to get value out of that investment. Although sales is always the ultimate goal, in the early days for any business, your advertising dollars should go towards testing the market, testing your advertising messages and keywords, and testing the resulting activity on your website.

Before even considering an advertising campaign, John should be checking to see if other companies are advertising in that market. If the same companies are advertising week after week in that market, then they must be able to turn a profit with their advertising.

Next we need to look at how the other companies are advertising for pet gates. In other words, what does their ad look like, what are the selling benefits, what is the call to action.

Equally important, John should visit the landing pages for these ads to see what the value propositions are for his competitors websites.

With all of this competitive information John should have a better idea how to start advertising, what ad testing he would like to try, and what he should be testing on his website in relation to engaging his customers.

John should then set up an advertising plan with a specified maximum budget and identify the outcomes that he would like to test (click through rate, landing page bounce rate, which keywords are performing best, and finally which combinations are resulting in sales).

Most marketers will tell you that you need to have at least 1,000 clicks to make a test campaign worthwhile. Early results in any test are not always accurate. You need to acquire a fairly broad market view before coming to any conclusions.

The old saying that you need to spend money to make money is so true when it comes to advertising. Make the money you are spending work for you, not work against you.

If you are not certain that you can do this yourself, don’t worry. The online marketing world is full of coaches and mentors that would be willing to help you through the early days and at an affordable price.