As the owner of an Internet based business, knowing how to drive traffic to your website is one of your most important responsibilities. If you do not have any traffic you will not get any sales. With this in mind, whatever kind of business you are in, traffic has to be your priority. This article will focus on Google AdWords pay per click advertising, known as PPC, which is an ideal way of targeting traffic to your website. However, in order to avoid the many pitfalls, which may be just around the corner, you need to have some knowledge about what you are doing.

First of all your ad campaign should be properly structured. When creating a new ad campaign its best to consider a number of smaller ad groups within, instead of making the mistakes of many by creating a single ad group and filling it with keywords by the thousands. It’s much better to come up with a few different categories as a way of describing your business and concentrate on developing clusters of closely related keywords within each group.

The next thing is to learn how to write an ad, specifically one which will draw the attention of the reader and entice them to click on it. As the number of characters allowed for the ad copy is limited, you can learn how to do this from the classified ads in magazines and newspapers. Take a look through the ads and make a note of any that really caught your attention, and then on closer inspection, ask yourself what attracted you to it. If you can write ads which get more clicks, you will increase your CTR (click through ratio) and this is likely to result in a lower minimum bid that you have to pay for each click.

The third tip is all about testing and tracking your ads. You can do this by creating multiple ads and then rotating them to see which ones get the best results as far as CTR is concerned. In order for your tests to be valid, run them so that each ad gets in the region of 50 clicks. When first setting up your campaign, make sure you take the option of evenly rotating your ads. If you do not do this the default option will let the system automatically optimize showing your best ad more regularly. It this happens you will not be able to run your tests accurately.

The learning curve at becoming proficient at Google AdWords is steep. However, if you stick at it and eventually master the system, you will be rewarded well by the targeted traffic to your website.

One excellent avenue for business promotion is Craigslist. Whether a person has a small part time business or a thriving business which has become a fulltime endeavor, Craigslist can help the business not only increase in popularity but its profits as well. In order to successfully promote a business on Craigslist, two components much be in place. The first includes reaching the target audience and the second is running a marketing campaign which is going to appeal to this target audience. This article will help show the reader how utilizing Craigslist can be used to grow a business by putting into place these two components.

Reaching Your Target Audience on Craigslist

It does not have to be difficult to promote a business on Craigslist. It is not really easier than promoting your business offline either. You may notice some similarities in promoting your business on Craigslist and promoting it offline. The main likeness is that the business promoter must do his or her research to find out just who the targeted audience is.

If your marketing campaign does not reach the intended audience, it does not matter how well thought out or innovative it was. That is why it is extremely important for those who are trying to promote their business on Craigslist to be sure that they get their ad under the proper heading so that their targeted audience will receive the intended message. Most of the posts on Craigslist are available free of charge except job listings in Los Angeles, New York City and the San Francisco Bay area as well as brokered housing listings in New York City. So it is that the small business owner can take advantage of the free postings on Craigslist to reach their target audience in multiple locations.

Consider a company that is offering moving services in Portland, Oregon. A small moving company that has just gotten started may want to take advantage of the free advertising available on Craigslist. In order to have the greatest opportunity to reach its target audience, the company should place a services offered posting under the labor and moving category for the counties in Portland in which the services are being offered. If they place the post in this manner, it is far more likely to reach an audience of those who are planning to move to another area in the county.

Additional benefits are also offered on Craigslist besides free postings. The most important benefit is a large audience. Over 4 billions readers view Craigslist every month. Having such a large audience, it makes it possible for posters to Craigslist to reach a large audience. However, be sure to categorize the advertisement correctly to ensure that your ad reaches the largest target audience possible.

Effectively Marketing on Craigslist

It is not so different to market effectively on Craigslist as it is to market effectively in other forms of print media. If you are going to conduct a marketing campaign on Craigslist, a very important element that you will need is professionally written copy that appeals directly to the target audience. It would be a good idea to hire a freelance writer who is skilled in writing sales copy for this job. The business owner might be very knowledgeable about his or her business, but does he or she have the necessary skills to convey the purpose of the business to others? The target audience may need to be convinced to visit a website and make a purchase, request additional information about products or services or even visit a traditional store.

The final component to market effectively is to place the ad in the correct section of Craigslist. The ad must not only be categorized correctly, but it must be placed in the proper physical location. Products or services which are just offered in a limited area such as a specific city or county should be advertised in these exact locations. For those who offer products by way of a website, they may want to consider placing an ad in all of the locations to which they are willing for their products to be shipped.

Remember that Craigslist is a very good place to advertise, but you are always going to have people who want something for nothing. Do not be discouraged by all of the “no shows” that your advertisement pulls in. Out of the thousands who try to use Craigslist for their own selfish purposes, you get many honest and upright people out there who are just trying to make some extra money.

For all practical purposes, ‘words’ have a two-way impact on people in terms of controlling their minds as well as changing their viewpoints completely. In fact, words literally are the ‘final word’ for inducement and allurement. Politicians, public relations professionals, and even elders convey their messages via the ‘word’ route. Such being the ‘power’ of words, their effective use can result in excellent advertising.

The use of modern words heightens inquisitiveness. It gives the buyers the feel of being the ‘first’ to try out a new product, thereby giving them the feel of having an upper hand. It has been a general trend, over the years, to advertise ‘laundry’ goods as being better that ever before. Most of the time, such ‘new’ products are a mere contemporary change of the earlier marketed products. However, the words and the newness factor highlighted in advertising together bring around a favorable response of the consumers.

The use of power words like ‘Money back guarantee’ help in gaining the confidence of the buyers. These words, at the end of any advertisement, have become an absolute ‘must’. Following this should be the mode of payment and the amount of money to be refunded in case the user does not feel satisfied.

Heightening the curiosity level of the people is the basic idea underlying sure shot success of any advertisement. The information crazy audience laps up whatever is offered to them on a new platter. The human tendency is that people do not want to miss trying out a new product and want to have upto date information.

Experts of the trade utilize the secret of power words. They pretend to conceal some important information, which is supposed to be revealed only after money is shelled out to try the product advertised.

The word ‘free’ word in the ‘catch phrase’ of any of the message is actually magical. Such a message sinks into the psyche of the buyer tempting him to go in for the free service. However, it is tightrope walk alluring consumers this way; and any breach of trust can result in losing a prospective customer.

Most of the time, ISP filters of websites block the ‘free’ word, fearing it to be spam, and hence the word appears as FR~E.

Another important word used in the field of advertising is ‘You’. Pointing straight at the consumers, the word ‘You’ adds a personal touch to the product or service advertised. A good seller should think as a buyer, and work out methods to sustain their interest, without ever letting it fall. Once this is done, let the buyer know that the product is an exclusive one, particularly meant for ‘You’. This way the buyers can be easily reached.

Another power word is ‘immediately’ – it indicates the sense of urgency. This is one word that influences the buyer a lot, urging him/her to avail the benefits of ‘Now’.

Give the buyer an impending feeling of possession – and see the power of the wonderful word ‘power’. It gives the buyer a sense of desire for going in for such a product that he/she was hitherto lacking.

In a nutshell, the foundation of advertising business lies in understanding consumer need and working out an effective plan towards fulfilling those particular needs. Rather than a mere statement of the facts, a good advertisement should allow the consumer to visualize the benefits of the product. Take the example of an advertisement for a digital camera – simply talking about its in-built memory of 1 GB would not be enough. Try to change the statement into adequate memory space for 50 videos or 350 pictures. This alteration offers an answer to a question in the mind of the consumer. It is practical to take cues from the sentence structure of successful advertisements of a similar product. Once the sentence to be highlighted has been decided, add zing to the overall campaign with a judicious use of selective ‘power words’.

A FFA, or free for all page is a very simple thing in both concept and reality. You can submit one line of text to the page and visitors can click on this text to visit your site if you are interested. This would be a great thing if they worked the way that most business owners would prefer that they did. What business owners, yourself included would like is to receive massive amounts of email from interested customers – but instead, what they see a lot of in their inboxes is email form other business owners trying t make a sales pitch. Not so productive, is it? For most, these FFA pages do not give the necessary return on your investment to make it worthwhile.

So why do FFA pages usually fail to get results? Think about it like this – your ad is just one of possibly thousands on this page. What’s more, these sites are often visited by other business owners who have placed ads, but rarely by those looking to buy a product or service.

These pages have another defect as well – they are generally designed to scroll. As new links are added, old ones just keep moving farther and farther down the page. At one time when FFA pages enjoyed less popularity than they do today, your ad may have been near the top for a day. Now, your ad may be out of sight within minutes! This means you would need to repost your ad again and again over the course of a day. And there is still the problem that you are not reaching customers on these pages, just other merchants.

Also counting against FFA pages is the fact that most search engines ignore them entirely. A search engine sees a FFA page as a page of unrelated links and passes it by. Remember, relevance is key with search engines – and FFA pages have nothing of the sort.

FFA webmasters are a bit smarter than those who use them to advertise. The FFA page will require an email address to submit your link; meaning the FFA site owner is building their email list every time someone posts an ad. It is the site owners of FFA pages who are truly the beneficiaries of these pages.

So is posting an ad on a FFA page a complete waste of time? That depends. If you are posting an ad there, the answer is likely yes. However, if you are the host of a FFA page, you can reap a lot of benefits – by doing so you can quickly build a list of prospective customers and that is really the only way to make good on the promise of FFA sites.