For online marketers, the lifeblood of steady business is constant, consistent advertisement impressions. Unfortunately, as any experienced PPC marketer will know, impressions can dry up at the drop of a hat, especially when bid prices change, major media buys take place, or new competitors come along and drive you out of the market. Whether you are advertising affiliate offers or simply generating traffic for your business website, an impression drought can cost you valuable income and generate unwanted stress.Don’t worry; there are ways to insulate you from impression droughts. From spreading your advertising dollars further to using organic traffic methods, online advertisers have found hundreds of ways to keep traffic up even when advertising networks are turbulent. These five methods are particularly useful for small online marketers, online businesses, and affiliate PPC advertisers.1. Diversify into search marketing.There are going to be times when major media buys reduce the pool of customers you can market to. There is not much you can do to fight them — they have got a higher advertising budget, and much more cash to throw at increased bid prices. Do not fight these types of advertising rivals through bid-wars. Instead, spend time on SEO work, allowing you to profit long-term while they fight for short-term ad impressions.2. Use multiple advertising platforms.Using one advertising platform means risking your entire business cash flow on the stability of their traffic. It is much wiser, both from an experimentation point of view and a security point of view, to spread your advertising traffic across multiple similar advertising platforms. For example: if you are primarily marketing on Google Adwords, considering spending advertising money on Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft Adcenter too.3. Do not break the rules!A lot of online advertising networks have relatively strict standards and rules, many of which you may not realize exist until it is too late. Do not be an unprepared and unaware advertiser; read through the terms and conditions of any advertising network you use, and make sure you work within them. Rather than banning advertisers outright, many networks simply limit impressions for advertisers that violate the terms and conditions.4. Have a wide range of advertisements running.The most popular advice you will hear amongst PPC marketers is to cut out any advertisements that are not bringing in serious profits. While it is great from an efficiency perspective, it is not the best for security and stability. What happens if you have optimized your advertisements down to the most profitable ten, but then all of those are suddenly disabled? You are left with no advertisements at all, and no online income. Focus on the most profitable, but keep moderately profitable advertisements around too so that you can weather potential storms comfortably.5. Use both PPC and CPM.Some advertising networks send more impressions to those that bid PPC. It is a sad reality — CPM advertisements are often given low-click page locations, allowing advertising networks to capitalize on both CPM and PPC marketers at once. Unfortunately, this behavior is not just limited to shady ad networks; many major ad platforms do it too. Fight back by using both PPC and CPM methods, allowing you to capitalize on low impressions through well-spread advertising spending.
How to Make Your Advertising Work
Which type of advertising should you use for your business?Many business owners will tell me, “Advertising doesn’t work!”I hear this frustration a lot from clients and prospects. So why is it that the majority of advertising doesn’t work?There are two types of advertisingType 1: Is image advertising
Type 2: Is direct response advertisingWhat is the difference?Image advertising is what you are most likely seeing when you see advertising. It’s the lone Beer can that say’s the brand name across the bottom of the page, or something else trying to be clever in the ad.Image advertising is the beautiful woman holding the shower gel trying to make you think, “If you use it, she will come to a shower near you.”Image advertising is all about getting the product out in front of you to make an impression. You may hear an advertising rep tell you that you will get 30,000 impressions per month when you advertise with their company.Wow! 30,000 impressions, that’s awesome you think to yourself. That’s a great number if you just want potential clients to hear, or see the name of your company.Image advertising is the main type of ads you see big companies run to get their name in front of you, and hopefully get “Top of Mind” awareness for their product when you’re shopping.This is OK I guess, if your marketing budget allows you to put millions of dollars into ads without any real accountability to know if the ad is working for you.
Your ProblemIf you own a small business, you may not have millions of dollars to put into advertising. Especially if you don’t know if it’s working for you.How much money do you and your company make based on an impression?I’ll let you decide on that number.The number I would encourage you to become friends with, is how many impressions convert into paying clients?So I bet you’re wondering about type two advertising, direct response, aren’t you?This type of advertising has some call to action, or “Direct Response” when your target audience see’s the ad.This could be as simple as “Call for our free report”, or “Click here to download the Top 10 Reasons your husband is a slug.”Go and do a search on examples of advertising and direct response ads. Then look at the samples and guess which one is all about the image, and which is asking for you to take action.If you see an order form on any ad, you know they are asking you to take some kind of action.When you see only the company name in an ad, this a classic example of image ads.What does the company want you to do when you see this ad?If you hear someone say something to the effect of, “I want them to think of us the next time they are shopping”, it’s most likely an image ad.Are you ready to take action on your ads?Here’s what I want you to do (I’m giving you your action step).Any time you decide to do advertising, ask yourself the following question.”When people see your advertising, what action do you want them to take after seeing it?”It should be an action that you can track to measure how much business did your advertising generate for you. This is how you make your marketing plan work.Measure the results of your advertising, and it will start working for you. If it doesn’t, you will know to stop running the ad.