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 “I have been thinking of buying some air time on the screens you see in petrol stations and various shops.
Has anyone used this form of advertising before and if so did you get a good response?”

Here is the response I gave. I decided to post a copy here as I often hear business owners ruling out a particular media based on a bad experience or an ill contructed campaign:

Like all forms of marketing you need to make sure that the following are all in place and aligned.

Market, Message and Media. If you have a great message but to the wrong market then your campaign will bomb e.g. Targetting pensioners with offers a all you can drink nightclub offer will bomb while the same offer to students could be a great success.

In this way people often blame the type of media they are using, saying things like direct mail doesn’t work, when in fact if you look more closely then perhaps the message was week or the market poorly targetted.

Therefore I’m not sure if there is much value asking if a type of media is good and whether it got a good response. What could bomb for one offer and market could be hugely profitable for another.

The only way to reall see if this type of media will work for your offering is to do the following.

Determine who your target market is.
Test an offer on a small scale to that target market and measure the response.
If the results are favourable then do more.
If the results are not favourable then tweak either the message, market or media and rinse and repeat. Simple huh?!

Anyway if you think this media reaches your target market then why not approach the owners of the screens and see if they will let you conduct a test. Spend a few hundred on a test and make sure you have some kind of tracking mechanism in your advert so you can see clearly the response generated.

As with all media don’t commit to a huge amount upfront without conducting a small test first. If they wont let you do this then move on to something else. If you buy 10,000 impressions and get no leads then buying 100,000 is not going to give you much of a different result.

Well there is a handy resource that allows you to spy on them and see all this information and more. Keyword Spy is a very easy to use tool and you can get a lot of vlaue out of it by just using the free trial version.

I started to use it recently and it does become quite addictive to see what people are bidding on and typically how much it can cost per click in different industries for different keywords.

The paid version of the service gives you even more detail and lots of very valuable information. If you are using pay per click marketing in your marketing arsenal then you should definately give Keywordspy a try

2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.

3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com.

4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.

5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com.

6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com.

7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.

8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories.

9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.

10. Optimise each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.

Another way that you can use writing and articles you have created to help your search engine rankings is to submit them to an article directory. One of the best ones to use is article dashboard and this contains thousands of articles on just about any subject you can imagine. The idea is that you submit your article and include a link back to your website in the footer of the article. Website owners can then pick up these articles for inclusion on their websites which results in giving your site multiple back links.

For example I might write an article about marketing in Ireland and post it to my blog, and then modify it and submit it to an article site. This kills two birds with one stone, it gives you new blog content which helps your ‘on site criteria’ i.e. inclusion of relevant content on your website and plenty of off site linking content both of which will help your sites search engine rankings, particularly if you include search terms and keywords in the title and body of your articles.

The advantage of a ppc campaign is that your promotional message is displayed when your target customer base is actively looking for a solution to a specific probelm by searching for it in a search engine.

Another benefit of ppc is that it is possible to make all of your marketing accountable, you can very quickly see what is working and do more of it and stop what isn’t working. This simply isn’t the case with traditional advertising which is much more expensive and harder to track.

So Irish businesses are jumping in head first and hoping to get some more business from this new medium. However based on some of the campaigns I have witnessed a lot of them won’t be getting a good return on their investment.

The good news is that there are a number of ways you can make your Pay Per Click Campaign more effective:

1. Continually test two adverts at once, drop the weaker performing one and keep the best one, then create a new advert and test this against your best one.
2. Make sure your landing page is relevant. So often I see advertisers sending traffic to the homepage of their website rather than deeper into a part of their web which is closely relevant to the original search term.
3. Capture contact information. Always try to capture the contact details of your prospects, at the very least an email address and name, even better if you can get the postal address and phone number. Getting this information will allow you to follow up by sending additional information. Remember on average it takes seven contacts before a prospect decides to do business with you. One of the best ways to capture prospect information is to offer something of value in return, perhaps a free book or other information.

I hope this has given you an idea of how you can improve your pay per click campaigns. If you need any help then please give us a call and we can help you.

The first is Google adwords, this is when you search for a term in google and matching adverts appear in a list of boxes on the right hand side.

The way this works is that you have to pay google every time someone clicks on your advert. The amount you pay depends on a number of factors, mainly how relevant your advert is to the search terms i.e. how often it is clicked and how much competition you have.

You bid how much you are willing to pay for a click, from a few cent per click upwards and can set a daily limit. For example on my hire a hot tub site I have picked keywords like hottub and jacuzzi Ireland etc. Typically I spend less than €50 per month, but really the sky is the limit depending
on your budget. The other way to get into google is under the main search results (this is known as an Organic listing).

This is much more complicated as it is based on a number of things like how popular your site is (number of other websites which link to it), how much content you have relevant to the search etc. Generally this happens over time so it can take months or years for this to work.

For a new website I would advise you to pay for the ongoing google adwords to get you up and running and then hopefully over time the site would grow in popularity as you add content etc, and then you will get a better organic listing in Google.