The secret to business success online is not building a better mousetrap. It’s getting more people to recognize that you’ve done it.
Using the Pareto 80/20 principle as an illustration, 80% of your success is about using advertising and promotion to build your brand while only 20% is based on creating a superior product.
Unfortunately, advertising is a two-edged sword. If done right, it can help you carve out a name for yourself. If done wrong, it can cripple your business, seducing you into spending more money than you make.
Avoid these 2 Common Mistakes
New business owners often make two mistakes. They prefer free traffic over paid traffic, and they prefer traditional advertising over newer forms of advertising.
3 Problems with Free Traffic
It may appear sensible to use free sources like blogging, social media, and forum marketing to get noticed online. After all, since you’re not spending any money, you can’t lose money.
However, when you look a little deeper into it, this is not a practical way to scale up a business fast. This is because using free traffic generation methods fails for three primary reasons.
One, these methods are huge time hogs. You have almost no time left in the business day to do anything else.
Two, these methods take a long time to work. In the meanwhile, your business is earning little to no revenue.
Three, they force you to work in your business rather than on it. Since you’re spending most of your time on getting traffic, you have no time for business innovation, improving conversions, and increasing customer satisfaction.
The Problem with Traditional Advertising
People like traditional advertising methods because they appear to have stood the test of time. However, this is a logical fallacy because advertising is subject to the laws of “psychological entropy.” The longer a form of advertising is used, the less effective it becomes.
You do yourself a disservice, for example, when you use inexpensive and inefficient advertising like banner advertising and print advertising.
Banner ads work less efficiently than before. Over time, many people have developed an aversion to even looking at them. Seasoned marketers refer to this as “ad blindness.” Today, other advertising media works much better.
Print advertising is still effective for brick-and-mortar businesses, but most readers rarely bother to copy a web address they see in a print ad into their computers.
Where to Advertise
You can get inexpensive, highly-effective advertising to build your brand and attract traffic by using sources like Pubsio, Google Adwords, and Facebook Ads.
How to Use Pubsio
Pubsio offers an advertiser in-site specific display and in-text advertising. As an advertiser, you have the power to leverage advanced optimization technology through total control of your own account. The account management software allows you to make key decisions to drive ad performance. You can access it at any time, get support when you need it, and get comprehensive reports to analyze your income stream in real time.
You have full control of the many different elements of your campaign. For instance, you can control how often ads are served.
How to Use Google Adwords
The mechanics of how to set up your ads are explained by Google, and much useful advice can be gleaned from Google’s blog called Inside Adwords.
However, a profitable strategy is up to you.
One excellent strategy is to start with a small budget.
Using the right keywords and the most relevant ads can limit your budget to $10 or $20 a day.
If you are spending more than this amount to get results, then you need to research your keywords again or figure out how to make your ads more relevant. Tweak long-term keywords to find those that are customer-focused and industry-specific. The right keywords will give you the highest click through rate and conversions.
Once you get results with a small budget, scale up your campaign with a larger budget.
How to Use Facebook Ads
Facebook ads provide focused consumers. To get the most value for your budget, target specific demographics and reach out to them with relevant ads. Targeting reduces wasting money on consumers who click out of curiosity with no intention of buying.
Again, you only need a small budget to test out the efficacy of your campaign. A budget from $10 to $20 per day budget is more than enough.
Quicksprout suggests that you use Facebook ads as a way to build relationships: “Once you have driven all of these fans to your page, it’s equally as important to continue to engage with them. While it may be nice to gain some quick sales with a few advertisements, many sales cycles require more relationship building.”
Paid Advertising Can Be Free
Although free advertising costs time and labor, paid advertising can free up time, labor, and dollar costs.
Although this sounds like a paradox, there is a simple logic to how you can make your paid advertising free.
First, study the science behind each of these three platforms before you spend a dime.
Then, only spend a small amount to test the system.
Finally, when you have reached a point where you earn much more than you spend, then your advertising is free. Advertising can be considered free if it pays for itself and leaves you with much more money than before.