Paid search
Paid search, by nature, is a very effective advertising path, but can be a very tricky one.
On one hand, you can be up and running within minutes in the major search engines, and get traffic coming in instantly.
On the other hand, you are exposed to click frauds, and the ease of loosing grip of your budget is frightening.
There is no point trying to teach how to run an “ad word” campaign in Google (or any other engine for that matter) within this page. Again, like many other aspects in this industry, that too, is a profession.
You should however know that the basics are the same, regardless of the engine you are using;
• Start small – do not rush into anything, especially in the smaller engines. Put $50-$100 and let the campaign go live first. See that the traffic is ok quality-wise, and only then move on.
• Limit the risk – cap your daily costs to a minimum ($20-25) that will still allow you to have some traffic delivered, but will let you slowly gain control of the campaign.
- Take your time – a day or two are not enough to get a feeling of how it will perform. If you were a professional – that might be enough – but that is not the case.
- Give it a few days, and only then sit and look at the results, and conclude what to do next.
- Learn the material – do not just put any keyword that feels right. Use some tools that are freely available to learn and predict which words will work best for you. Learn how to build the ad. There are ways to improve the performance, using the exact same text.
- Enlarge slowly – keep in mind that a $100 and $10,000 will perform differently under the same circumstances. It is very dependent on the engine you use, the industry, keywords and so on.
- Optimize costs – play with the rates you are paying, you will note that a slight raise will get you more activity, thus more costs, but a slight decrease in rate will only reduce costs…
- Give it time – like statistics are, you need a good sample group to analyze and decide upon. Do not rush into conclusions after a day or two.
- Enlarge again – and see if the results are as expected.
And so on…
Please note – in some countries, you may contact the search engines headquarters and ask for a personal account manager to get you going, and manage your campaign. It is a long shot, and most of the times you’ll never get to actually speaking to anyone, but it is worth the try.
Another note – remember: Google might be big, but it is definitely not the only search engine in town… furthermore, professionals usually claim that if you market something locally, go for a local search engine, as its performance will be much more targeted to your users (meaning that Google may translate their results/ interface, and so on, but a German search engine will perform better if you want to advertise something to a German audience…)
Organic/SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Black hat
Black hat SEO is referred to the abuse of internet means in order to promote a website and position higher (better) in the search engines organic results. Black hat SEO is sometimes useful, but at times will get you banned and vanished from the results for good.
As this is not an ethical way to advertise your site we will not detail further here.
White hat
Opposite to black hat, white hat is the ethical way of organically/ naturally promoting your site within the search engines’ results, by following their tips and instructions as for “how to build your site correctly”.
In other words, it is the way you can build your site so the search engine will “like it”, yet not brake any ethical rules on the matter.
