In the web industry it can sometimes be hard to get the traffic that you desire. This is called normal life. It can sometimes feel like your advertising dollars are just a drop in the ocean compared to other people’s campaigns. There is a solution to this, however. It is called viral and geurilla marketing. How do these types of marketing work? Well, first of all there is the ripple effect. A drop in the ocean doesn’t have to stop once the waves from the big boys crash through. All it takes is some creative thinking, some free time, and a venue.
Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
by Andrew on April 25, 2007 Add A Comment!
When it comes to making money online, two very popular methods are through affiliate marketing and pay per click ads. When it comes to marketing PPC ads I almost always consider this MFA (Made For Adsense). If you are driving traffic to a useless site with the intent of driving higher click rates then you are running a MFA site. MFA is borderline “black-hat” marketing and is not technically allowed by Google.
As for affiliate marketing, this is something entirely different. Affiliate marketing companies such as Commission Junction or Azoogle allow you to promote CPA (Cost Per Action) ads to your users. With CPA ads you are only paid if a click on your ad results in an action such as a purchase, a signup, a lead, etc. One popular affiliate program I am a publisher for is eBay. With eBay I receive a percentage of eBay’s profit at the end of a sale if the winning bidder was referred to eBay through one of my ads. There are also other ways to make money with that program but that is the basic payment structure. CPA and affiliate based advertising setups are quickly becoming a popular alternative for PPC. Advertisers are sick of having their money wasted on click fraud and other forms of PPC abuse including false keyword targeting, MFA pages, etc.
by Andrew on April 19, 2007 Add A Comment!
Often times when a “newbie” wants to make some with a new website, he or she will be quick to throw up ads. In this day and age of affiliate programs it is very simple to quickly have access to publish all sorts of ads on your website from the start. There are a few problems that this will cause, however.
First of all, if you do not have daily traffic coming in already it will be hard to attract repeat visitors if your website is cluttered with ads. I definitely think that a few non-intrusive ads are fine, but anything ugly or annoying will almost 10 times out of 10 jinx your site from the get-go.
by Andrew on April 14, 2007 Add A Comment!
It’s funny that just yesterday I was writing about Google buying YouTube for $1.6 billion dollars. Late yesterday afternoon Google just announced their hefty purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.
Google revolutionized the web advertising industry as well as the concept of creating successful ad supported free services such as gmail, Google earth, Google maps, google desktop search, and of course the Google.com search engine. One area Google has been targeting is display advertising such as banner ads and video ads. Adsense publishers have always had the option to allow image ads to be displayed on their websites, but, Google’s flagship advertising product has always been text based contextual ads.With
the addition of DoubleClick to the Google family, they will have access to the success that DoubleClick has had in the display ad market. Google’s stock price last traded at $466.29 on Friday. It will be interesting to see which direction it moves at the bell on Monday morning.
After Google boought YouTube in October of 2006, their stock saw a steady increase past the $500 mark. Take a look at this stock chart from late 2006. I’m not saying it will or will not happen again. I’m just saying that the initial public reaction seems good. Things could get interesting next week. I’ll definitely be keeping my TD Ameritrade ticker windows open.
by Andrew on April 13, 2007 1 Comment
What do Google, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Flikr, and del.icio.us all have in common?
There are a few things. First and foremost though, they are each 100% branded names. None of them are names that you would naturally type into your web browser if you didn’t already know what each site was. Obviously these companies have all become phenomenally successful. Google was recently valued at $100+ billion dollars. YouTube was recently purchased by Google for $1.6 billion dollars. MySpace was sold to Fox News Corp for $800 million dollars. Yahoo acquired flikr and del.icio.us for around $30 million a piece. The only question remaining is when will the owners of Digg.com decide it’s time to sell, and to whom for how much?
The numbers seem to speak for themselves. In the online world branded names are king. Who wants to go to (for example) “SocialNetworking.com” when “MySpace.com” sounds so much cooler? Why would you go to search.com when you could just “Google” what you want to find? “Do you YouTube?” Do you want to “Digg” it? Do you find certain websites and news stories “Delicious?”
