In particular, the Internet has embraced this truth and virtually exploded with a variety of means toward the end of successful, specific advertising. Internet advertising campaigns range from the obvious and the notorious (tasteful banner advertising versus badly-worded spam emails) to the clever and the outrageous (Amazon’s ‘Still not big enough’ television campaign from the late 90s, and Halo 2′s legendary ‘I Heart Bees’ viral marketing alternate reality game).

Obviously, some of these efforts are more successful than others, and some are successful in all the wrong ways. The exiled Nigerian prince who wants to share his vast wealth with lucky, lucky you has become a pop-culture meme and in-joke, practically an obligatory reference in any discussion of modern marketing or Internet spam.

However, a great deal of web advertising is quite a bit less flashy than the aforementioned efforts, yet is seen by every user who runs a request through a search engine. When engines return a search, they generally include two sections in the result. The first is the target of the search itself, which is the Organic SEO result, the second is a series of advertisements off to the side of or above the organic result, known as Pay Per Click advertisements.

SEO

For those who don’t know what SEO is, this acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization. In short and simple terms, every search engine provides results based on a series of criteria, generally keyword and content related. The engine compares the search request to its index of websites and their descriptions, and provides the most relevant answers it can, ranked in order of precedence.

The first sites to come up are the most closely related to the search terms as the engine understands them. This is why different engines may rank sites differently – Yahoo, Google and Bing have different indexing and keyword criteria, so their responses to a particular search may vary. It is termed Organic SEO because the results are returned organically, or naturally – there is no external interference or override changing the results, they simply return per the standard operating practices of the search engine.

Organic SEO has the advantage of having no inherent costs associated with it. Proper search engines don’t charge businesses for their ranking in the list, so the only required investment is building a noteworthy site that generates the traffic and keyword results that will bring a high ranking. The downside is that it requires a great deal of research to properly take advantage of this strategy. Craigslist alone abounds with writing jobs catering to experienced SEO writers, and entire websites exist discussing the ins and outs of the practice. In addition, it relies entirely on users searching for terms that relate to your site, leaving the situation far less in your business’s hands than some owners may be comfortable with.

PPC

In pay per click advertising, businesses contact a search engine and bid on certain keywords they feel are particularly relevant to their website. For example, a company making horse saddles might bid on keywords pertaining to horses, riding events, and saddles. Then, when someone searches these terms, the search engine provides a link to this business in the form of a pay per click advertisement. The name pay per click comes from the fact that the company must pay the website a fee every time a user clicks the advertisement.

Pay per click advertising is attractive because it increases the odds of really snagging a targeted audience. Rather than having one result possibly come up in a search, there’s another result just off to the side, increasing the chances of gaining user attention. On the flip side, PPC can quickly become a cost burden. Every single click must be paid for, and there’s no guarantee that every click will result in a sale, meaning costs could skyrocket before a business is prepared to deal with them.

Making the Choice

Often times, the best choice is to strike a balanced approach between SEO and PPC style advertising. Just where that balance lies depends entirely on the business in question. The savvy web advertiser will carefully consider keyword popularity before choosing a PPC campaign, and perhaps even set aside an actual budget to account for those users who will click through but are not looking to buy.

Additionally, there are literally thousands of experienced SEO writers available for employ at inexpensive rates for short term work, meaning the organic SEO standing of a page can be improved with relatively little investment. As ever, the keys are research and understanding, both of the target audience and the means with which you intend to reach them.

Editor’s Note: Also published here.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

Read more articles written by Enzo F. Cesario

YouTube, a site where literally anybody can upload their videos for the appreciation of others, became the fourth most popular site on the Internet in less than a year. Compare that to newspapers and television, which both have been experiencing decreasing viewership in recent years. People need, want, and will seek out every conceivable sort of information, and the Internet is the place to find it.

Who Wants To Know?

Information isn’t just of use to the casual browser or dedicated auction enthusiast, however. Equally and increasingly interested are the very people posting content to the many pages on the web. Who is visiting which pages? How much traffic is your site getting, and how does it measure up against traffic going to similar sites? What has changed since you put up the big new advertising system last year? Necessity being the mother of invention, this increasing craving for varied and precise forms of information has led to the steady growth of a field called Web Analytics.

What Are You Looking At?

Put simply, Web Analytics is a system of study dedicated to collecting, measuring, and reporting on web and Internet data. This general idea breaks down further into two broad disciplines. The first is on-site analytics, which concerns itself with the journey of each user to a website, and is of primary concern to the owners of that site. It records information ranging from a record of which pages are being visited to a comparison of which pages garner more purchases from visitors. Off-site analytics focuses on information on the Internet as a whole, such as what websites more people are visiting, and what sites are being talked about most frequently. Both methods seek to answer the key question for any website operator – what are people looking at?

But What Does It All Mean?

Proper Web Analytics goes a step further than simple data collection, however. It also concerns itself with interpretation of the data in a context that allows the site owner to take appropriate steps. Let’s use the advertising campaign mentioned earlier as an example. Simple web measurement would be the collection of how many hits and purchases the site gathered before and after the campaign. A serious analytic comparison would explain how quickly purchases picked up after the change, what products and portions of the site drew more traffic as a result, and which pages remained unaffected. In short, web measurement is the gathering of the data; Web Analytics is the comparison and interpretation of that data.

The importance of the analytics field to the modern site owner can be observed in the sheer volume of material available on the subject. Sites offer free programs allowing users to set their own metrics, and others can be purchased, offering extra features and a professional interface. Hardcover and electronic format books have been published dealing with the material, and people have formed associations for the purpose of standardizing Web Analytics methodology and terms.

There is even a Web Analytics conference, the E-metrics summit, held in Santa Barbara, California and London, England each year. Going even further, there are listed job offerings in the field that offer salaries approaching $100,000 a year. Clearly this is not a passing fad, but a serious, vital step for any website interested not just in drawing an audience, but keeping it.

It’s All About Information

Of course this all begs the question – how does a user get started. Moreover, to what degree should they seek to implement Web Analytic tools and techniques? Perhaps a bit counter-intuitively, the quest for information begins with information. Site owners know what they want to accomplish with their sites, be it promoting a specific product or generating an audience for geopolitical discussions in a casual atmosphere. This information is the best place to start because it allows the user to begin understanding what information will help them pursue their goal.

For example, if a page is intended to promote an e-book series, then the user wants to know what information will help them do that promotion. They can then look for analytic tools that will tell them what pages are more successful at selling e-books, and what techniques are less successful.

Taking the time to sit down and think through the purpose that analytic information is ultimately intended to accomplish will make the search easier, and more fruitful from the beginning. With this basic framework established, the next step is the web itself. A simple web search on ‘Web Analytics’ or ‘Web Analytics for beginners’ will return a substantial amount of information. From there users can locate articles, videos, and e-books that will help them make the decisions they need to make their websites successful.

Editor’s Note: Also published here.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

Read more articles written by Enzo F. Cesario

Copywriting is the creation of text used in advertising, regardless of medium. This covers every aspect of an advertisement: promotional flyers, jingles, slogans, billboards, and web pages. All of these strive to put your product or service in the best light possible and are aimed directly at the consumer; except for web pages. With web pages there is another audience your advertisement must also target: the search engine.

What’s a Search Engine, and Why Isn’t it Finding Me?

Think of a search engine as being a giant phone book: customers looking for a type of business will often look up that category and start by calling the first listing. Because phone books are indexed alphabetically, almost every category will have a business with a name beginning with “a,” or even “aaa.” Likewise, Internet users who aren’t familiar with the category they’re looking at will start with the first link they see when they search for something. However, dozens or even hundreds of factors determine the placement of these pages. This is where SEO comes in.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Like naming your business “AAA” for placement in a phone book, SEO techniques match web pages with the criteria that search engines use so that they are placed as high on a search as possible. Web pages are placed on search engines through the use of a web crawler. This is a program that systematically searches for new web pages and categorizes them. Because the Internet is so massive, these crawlers are designed to weed out useless pages and concentrate on unique ones that will be useful to people who are doing the search. Search engines use dozens of factors in their algorithms to find and place web pages. They are very secretive about the specific factors so that no one can cheat their system by writing a web page just so it will be placed on top. While the specifics are unknown, there are a few things all search engines use to categorize pages: the number of links to a page, its ranking on website traffic sites, and keywords in the page.

Use SEO and Play By the Rules

We all depend on getting accurate, useful results from search engines. Search engine companies actively modify their criteria to keep spam from showing up on their pages and to keep their users happy. Therefore the best way to use SEO to get people to your web page is by playing by the rules; pages that have useful information will stay on top of searches, while those that don’t are quickly removed.

So What CAN I Do to Get My Business Noticed?

Many search engines sell ads, but any reliable service will not sell search placement, nor does advertising with them influence your place on their searches. There are three things you should be concerned with to ensure a good ranking:

1. Keyword indexing: HTML pages can use meta tags that tell search engines what topics a page covers. It is important to include as many words related to the subject of a web page in its meta tags. However, placing popular but unrelated words, such as a celebrity’s name, or hiding keywords behind backgrounds or images on a page to generate search results will quickly get the page ignored.

2. Good linking: Links are very important to getting your page noticed, but only if they’re from reliable sources and are written to emphasize keywords. Links from known link sellers will not improve your page rank, and will cause consumers to distrust your site. Linking within your site to appropriate pages and getting others in a related area to link to you will help your page ranking immensely.

3. Limited web crawling: This may seem counter-intuitive, but there are some pages that you may not want to show up on a search engine, like temporary pages or login screens. Most search engines consider internal search pages to be spam, and allowing them to be crawled will lower your search ranking. This can be prevented using the robots exclusion standard: a text file named “robots.txt” placed in the root directory of a domain will tell crawlers which parts of your web site to skip.

SEO is vital in copywriting for Internet-based advertisements. Properly implemented, it will help keep your page on the top of search lists. By creating good links, using accurate keywords, and limiting web crawling to useful pages, you can ensure customers can find you.

Previously published here.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

Read more articles written by Enzo F. Cesario

Same as it Ever Was

At its core, online marketing follows the same principles as any other means of marketing – a provider has a product or service they wish to sell, so they advertise in order to draw potential customers’ attention to the information they’ve put together. Just like television commercials, online marketing has to be creative and informative to truly catch the attention of the discerning customer. We’ve all heard of popup and banner ads that do nothing but hog resources and annoy potential customers rather than attract them to the product, and that result is hardly healthy for any business.

And Now for Something Completely Different

One method that sidesteps the click-away tendency is the use of a blog to market the product. Blog is a shorthand term for web log, and refers to a serial, online journal or record intended for regular viewing. Examples of blogs include noncommercial ventures such as personal diaries posted to Livejournal, the daily record of campaign events for the more tech-savvy politicians, and ‘hobby’ blogs that cover an activity such as cooking or model airplanes. However, they can also include outright commercial ventures, such as a blog intended to promote a new product, consisting solely of video posts explaining the various advantages to the new product.

It’s Easier Than Herding Cats

Some blogs strike a balance between these two extremes. Consider the highly successful LoLCats website. This site began solely as a hobby, posting humorous images of cats. However, due to effective word of mouth promotion among people with similar interests, the site grew quickly, spinning off additional sites and generating an extraordinary amount of advertising revenue. The site has grown so much that Time magazine reported the company was purchased for two million dollars in 2007.

Now, this result is obviously not the norm. For every cheezburger success story, there are thousands of blogs that toil on in obscurity, accomplishing nothing at all. The differences can be many, but they can be boiled down to concerns relating to effective marketing.

Give it the Old College Try

Let’s say that a user named Ron has a passion for low budget college cooking, and wishes to make money writing about it. Ron starts a small blog, using the popular WordPress blogging system, and begins posting two or three times a day. He posts recipes, money saving ideas, and ‘bet you didn’t know’ material, building a decent sized archive. To get an audience, Ron begins visiting and participating in cooking and college related forums, mentioning his blog and its goals to his audience, gathering new users with patient, active efforts.

Eventually, Ron takes two steps toward commercial success when he monetizes the blog through an advertising revenue program (such as Google’s AdSense), and by using the blog to promote his new eBook, “Collegiate Cuisine”. To hook readers, he promises not only recipes he’s already included on the site, but special tips on inexpensive ways to get cooking tools and a few new recipes he hasn’t shared yet.

Will this model work? Perhaps. If Ron is too pushy, he might turn people off to his product before they ever come to his site. If he’s too timid, his message will get lost in the tide of the Internet. If he chooses poorly in the ads he allows on his site, users won’t click and the ads will generate no money. So the second key is research and careful attention. Ron and other blogging marketers have to study the market, pay attention to peoples’ needs and input, and adjust their presentation accordingly.

But is There Any Money in it?

To return to the point that there is money to be made in blogging, one would be remiss not to pay attention to the successful Problogger. In the classic ‘make money teaching others to make money,’ tradition, this is a blog that makes its revenue by teaching users how to make money through professional blogging. Many other sites, such as FreelanceWritingGigs, swear to Problogger’s integrity and efficacy and the site does provide a great deal of information. So there clearly IS money to be made in the blogging-as-marketing world.

Back to the Basics

The key to blog marketing is the same key to any business venture, appropriateness. The savvy businessman will evaluate their entire business, and do the research to determine if blogging is a vital addition to what they’re trying to accomplish. Blogging allows for a wider audience than local advertising, which could lead to expanding into nearby cities, or shipping to distant locales. It is an option that should seriously be examined, and approached with the same degree of research and caution as any business venture or proposal.

Article also published here.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

Read more articles written by Enzo F. Cesario