How To Advertise Cheaply & Effectively On The Internet
How To Advertise Cheaply & Effectively On The Internet
By: Dave Cole
Advertising, that's the name of the game isn't it?
To make money with any online business, one thing
you've got to do is: get the word out about your Web site.
Without traffic, and quality targeted traffic, your chances
of making any kind of return on your investment are pretty
low.
The question everyone wants to know is: Where and How
do I advertise to get the most effective results. What should
you do and what shouldn't you do?
For info on what you shouldn't do, see our article
on "How Not To Advertise on The Internet" here:
http://choosetoprosper.com/advertise_online.html
Now, what should we do.
We want to advertise in the most cost effective and yet
productive method possible. The answer is: Search Engines,
but not necessarily just any search engine. The number one
engine is Google. That's our target. A good number of
"other' search engines on the net tie in to Google, and
they have the highest traffic of any engine going.
Here's what we did.
Starting at the first of this year, 2003 we spent several
months compiling over 250 pages of pet care information.
In April of 2003, we got them all posted on our site at
These pages covered info on dogs and cats, on a wide variety
of subjects. Remember: didn't even come into
existence until January of 2003 when we bought the domain name,
and the domain didn't get on the Web until March.
At the end of August we checked our Web stats and had
around 29,000 visitors in August alone. That from a start
of zero visitors in April.
Our search string requests for August were over 6500.
Meaning that out of all the search engines out there, that
many searches were made that were filled by our site on
various keywords.
One example, go to http://google.com and type in the keyword
phrase: tapeworms in dogs. You'll find we have a number one
listing for that phrase. Not bad for the web page being
up only since April of this year.
Now if your cat is eating all your house plants, what
are you going to do? Go to Google and type in "cat
eats house plants" and you'll find we have a number one
and number two listing for that phrase.
We put up over 125 pages on horse care information in
June of 2003. Again, go to Google and type in the keyword phrase
"types of horses". You'll find that in only 3 months time,
we have attained the number two listing.
Then type in "horse treats", you'll find we have the number
8 listing on the first page, which is absolutely excellent
considering the competition for this phrase.
And we could give you a bunch of other keyword phrases and
keywords that rank very high on Google, and since Yahoo and
other engines use Google, rank also in the same high spots for
them.
What this also means is: a steady stream of very high quality
and targeted traffic to our site on a daily basis.
How did we attain such a high ranking on so many keywords
in such a short time, and what are our expenses in doing so?
First off, we provided Internet users with quality information
on a wide variety of topics, all within a defined field.
In other words, we gave pet owners a lot of really good
information on all aspects of pet care for dogs, cats and horses.
Google likes sites that provide quality information. They could
care less about flash introductions or fancy graphics. In fact,
while our pages look nice, they certainly aren't award winners for
graphics. However, for the user, they load fairly quickly, are
short, and easy to read.
Secondly how did we rise so high in rankings such a short time?
We did it because we didn't target the major keywords in
the field. We targeted less used keywords, but also targeted a
lot of them.
For instance, dog tapeworms only had 325 requests per month
on Overture for July. Types of horses had 1114. The big boys
in the pet related field like Petsmart, Petco, Purina, etc,
don't' go after the small, less used keywords. But we did
and if you are seeking information on tapeworms in dogs,
or your kitty eating the house plants, do a search,
you've got to see that our site is where you'll
find what your looking for.
And of course after you read the info we give you, you also
read about our pet products we have for sale.
What we also did was find three related sites with very high
established rankings on Google and purchase some small
adverts with them. This amounts to about $30 a month in
advertising costs, but has been a tremendous help in giving
our pages much higher rankings with Google.
See Google likes sites where they find links from other very
high ranking sites back to them. For instance,
http://infohorse.com is a very high ranked site, in
fact it's the 4th largest horse site on the Internet.
We were able to secure a two year link back to us for about
$5 a month. This link back has made absolutely a big
difference in ranking our horse related web pages. Before
we got that link, our types of horse keyword phrase ranked
very low.
What we never did was submit any of our pages to any
search engine using the free submits, nor did we ever
post to any FFA or links pages. Google doesn't like FFA
or Links pages and will penalize you if they find your
web page on one of those.
In a nutshell, what we did was:
1. Provide Internet users with valuable, quality content on a topic.
2. Get a few links back to us from established, high ranking
sites. (Not from us to them, but from them to us only)
3. Use the right meta tags and keywords.
4. Spend about 30 dollars a month in advertising on the right pages.
Here's the meta tags we used for the Types of Horse page
<head>
<title>The Three Types of Horses</title>
<meta name="description" content="different breeds and types of
horses">
<meta content="horse breed, horse type, type horse, heavy horse,
light horse,
pony, draft horse, horse care" name="keywords">
</head>
Nothing fancy or deceptive there.
So what you need to do is:
1. Find a market you really like to be involved with.
2. Learn as much as you can about that market.
3. Get your own domain name related to that market.
4. Provide Internet users with quality info on that topic from
web pages on your domain.
5. Get your site linked from two or three other already
established sites in that field.
That's all we did and the cost for us was registering the domain
name at 12 dollars a year, monthly hosting for the web site at
plus 30 dollars a month for adverts.
We also spent about $60 to submit our site manually to
Inktomi and Momma.com, although I honestly don't believe it
made any difference in our page rankings with Google. What
the Inktomi listing did was get us a decent number
of hits from MSN search. I personally think the
listing with Momma was a waste and wouldn't do it again.
So if you don't have a lot of money to spend on
advertising, I think that from the above, you can see
that it is possible to achieve a great number of
Internet visitors to your site, and do it very
cheaply.
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Dave Cole
Prosperity: The Choice Is Yours
Copyright © 2005
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