Two different methods of internet marketing, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, are pay per click (PPC) advertising and organic SEO. Let us take quick look how to affectively use them and what some of the benefits and drawbacks are.

PPC Advertising

PPC is exactly what it sounds like, you pay every time somebody clicks your advertisement, the most popular PPC network is Google Adwords but there are many different providers of PPC programs. The most obvious benefits to PPC advertising are immediate exposure to your market, flexible plans for spending (theoretically the more you spend, the more traffic you get) and quite a bit of control over the whole operation. Using PPC advertising networks can be tricky but there are rules and guidelines that you can follow that will almost guarantee results.

PPC Adwords is based entirely around keywords, an advertiser bids on certain keywords so that every time their ad is shown and clicked, they pay a certain their bid amount. The tricky part is choosing quality keywords that will ensure your ads are being shown to people who should be seeing them. Let us say that you are selling a book on self help, what keywords would you bid for? Some will be obvious but out of your price range, for example “self help books” might be a bit above your budget, so you have to get creative. Try to put yourself in the mind of an internet browser who is looking to buy a book on self help; would you be searching for something like “ways to be happy” or for a product like “self help book to make me happy”? Figuring out what your target market wants is essential to a successful PPC campaign.

Organic SEO

Another option for advertising online is organic SEO, this is traditionally viewed as ranking for your keywords in search engines but has also recently referred to building reputation on social networks, for now we will focus on the benefits of ranking for your keywords.

Similar to PPC advertising, establishing an organic position in search engines is dependent on keywords. You want to target and optimize your website for keywords that will bring in visitors you want to have visiting your website, i.e. visitors who want to buy your products. There are many different ways to optimize your website and begin ranking online for your keywords, fortunately most of them from building backlinks to article marketing, be creative and use the internet for research, you will have more tactics than you know what to do with before too long.

PPC advertising and organic SEO are both viable and important options, both challenging, both potentially rewarding and can both bring you visitors, invest some time learning about them today to start converting more and earning more.

Image Source: Seolair

Social Media is quickly becoming THE way to promote online business and websites. There are three main reasons for this, which are: the high amounts of back links, the increased attention to the website, and the increased amount of traffic sent to the website. Social media is a cheap, and generally free way for businesses and websites to gain free exposure resulting in the three things just stated.
Social media is built around interactions and conversations. So, in order for it to work for people wanting to advertise, they need to modify their techniques into a more personal, and conversational tone. This can allow businesses to create a face, and not hide behind corporate shields, resulting in more end-user trust, as well as an easy to obtain email marketing list.

Preparation is key for virtually anything, and is key when you are entering the social media market for the first time as an advertiser. First off, you need to know your audience. Hopefully, your audience, or at least part of it, is young, because mainly, the youth are the ones using social media, although the middle-aged and older sectors appear to be growing in numbers among the various websites out there. As a business, you should already have identified the demographics of your target audience, and with that, you already have your groundwork. The next step would be to analyze your competition, find out what they are doing and if it works, and if it does work, figure out why and how you can do that too.

After that, you should make sure you have employee guidelines. This might not be a big deal to small sites, but for large businesses with tons of employees, it’s important that they know what they can and cannot do in the social media realm when representing the business. That being said, it might be helpful to only have one or two people working on your social media sites and blogs, so everything is run smoothly. It is important for those people to update them frequently and monitor the conversations. They must also keep everything relevant to today’s society, and of course, interesting.

In closing, social media is meant to be fun, so keep it that way. Don’t bore people with plain old advertising. Make it new. Make it exciting. Make it cutting edge. If you do that, people will be interested in you and what you have to offer, whatever it might be.

If you have a blog or a website and are looking for a way to make money from it then i recommend joining upto Googles partnership program called Google Adsense.  Google adsense is a partnership opportunity that you will allow Google to show their adverts on your website and whenever a customer of yours clicks on their adverts you earn a commission instantly

The commission you earn depends on your content, some adverts can earn you upto $5 and some 0.20c depending on how much the advertiser has paid Google.  Google then spilts the revenue with you for placing the add on your website.  From the advertisers point of view this is called PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising via the Google Adwords network.

The great thing about Google adsense adverts is that you can easily intregrate them into your website or blog either as text or banners.  You can change the look and colour of the text to match your content which makes your reader want to click on the adverts as they will think they are part of your website so you earn commission very easily.

There is a very good plugin for wordpress that you can upload and activate and allow Google adsense to show up in your articles on pages.  Just run a search on Google for the plugin.  Installation is very easy.