Now that we have covered most of the basics of preparing your ad design, we move on to the places where you can distribute it. Posting it online is increasingly popular, with myriad opportunities everywhere. In fact, there are so many opportunities to inexpensively post your ad that you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out which ones to use and which ones are worth the money. Unfortunately, you are not unlike millions of other people doing the same thing. And, the competition for the internet visitors attention is greater every minute of every day.
So, we will begin by saying this is a never ending endeavor that consumes all of your time – and money. The question really is about how much you’re going to put into it and what your expectations are.
We’re going to briefly cover some of the key facets of online marketing. We can provide in-depth discussions for those who are interested, just give us a call.
Website
For your marketing activities you need a website to promote. You can have a great looking website, but getting traffic to your website is not easy, nor cheap. Designing and developing a good website is a great idea. But, of course, then you have to get people to visit it, either through marketing the products on the website or simply marketing the website itself.
There are many facets to learn about in order to proceed. If you’re not familiar with website development, this can be a daunting task. Some of the subjects you will need to study and learn about include:
- Google’s Penguin (and the 7 updates between 2013 and 2016)
- Google Analytics/Google Search Console
- Taxonomy
- Content
- Keywords and Keyphrases
- Backlinks and Internal Links
- Site Reputation
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Optimizing for Local SEO
- Schema/Structured Data Markup
- Duplicate content
- Optimizing H1 and title tags
- Site speed
Each one of these areas is an entire subject unto itself that require time and energy to understand how they affect your ranking and search results. As we continue this blog, we will touch on some of these and go through some in more detail to assist you to understand how they work.
Social Media Marketing (SM)
We are all familiar with Social Media on some level. Most people use these platforms to communicate with others, post material they think is interesting and advertise their businesses and products. These platforms include: Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
The design principles covered earlier in this blog are helpful at understanding how to design an ad for posting on social media platforms.
What most people need to understand is that these ads are usually cheap and fairly easy to post for most people, however, getting them to actually work for you is not that easy, if at all.
Email Marketing
We all get a ton of emails every day from companies trying to sell us products or influence us to visit their websites. Simple, right? NOT! This might be one of the more complicated and difficult forms of marketing. You have to understand things like “warming up” an IP address and domain authority. These are not easy at all.
The one thing you don’t want to do is use your own domain to send bulk emails unless you have an established relationship with each person on your list, and use a reputable service like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp, and follow their guidelines. Buying an email list from a list provider and using your own domain to send emails will undoubtedly get you blacklisted and shut down your website and email. That can be a disaster.
