When
advertising on the Internet, you will want to use as many low
cost or NO cost advertising sources as possible. That is the
big advantage of the Internet over traditional methods of advertising.
Sending out follow-up letters to interested people is FREE.
There are thousands of sites where you can place FREE classified
ads.
Many
service providers have a section for free ads. Placing a Signature
File on the bottom of all of your emails and message boards
is Free. Best of all though, search-engine advertising is free.
Search
engines are misunderstood in a major way. It is possible to
get 100 of 1,000 people a day visiting your site through the
major search engines, but it ISN'T EASY. You CANNOT just go
through and submit your site to 350 search engines using automated
software. It doesn't work that well. You will notice little
or no added traffic from such methods.
In
all honestly, there really are only 8 search engines which people
really get traffic from. The other ones are much smaller and
if you go to their sites you may see 1,000,000 hits, but when
you do a search you only see 300 or so hits. This means that
everyone has submitted their sites there, BUT almost no one
is using them to do any searches for anything.
The
eight major search engines will produce 95 percent or more of
your search-engine traffic ... They are:
- Alta
Vista - http://www.altavista.com
- Excite
- http://www.excite.com
- HotBot
- http://www.hotbot.com
- Info
Seek - http://www.infoseek.com
- Lycos
- http://www.lycos.com
- Open
Text - http://www.opentext.com
- Web
Crawler - http://www.webcrawler.com
- Yahoo
- http://www.yahoo.com
The
problem is that if you are not listed in the top 20 of a specific
search engine under a certain keyword, you have little or no
chance of ever actually being found. There are millions of people
submitting their sites to these search engines and if you are
coming up in the 125,021 place, NO ONE will ever come to your
site through that search engine.
Learning
how to submit your site to the search engines and getting top
positions isn't always easy. You have 1,000,000 people trying
to make sure they get ahead of you in line. You have to learn
a lot of how to get high listings on the search engines and
just what to do to take advantage of them.
Think
about it though... 500 hits a day are possible from search engines.
How much would you have to pay to get that kind of traffic from
banner advertising.
The
cheapest place I have seen for targeted advertising lately for
banners cost $250 for 40,000 banner viewings. If you had a banner
with a click-through ratio of 5 percent (Which is high) you
would get 2,000 hits for your $250.
So
with 500 hits a day or 3500 hits a week, that would be equal
to $437.50 a week in FREE advertising you could get just for
getting extremely high listings on the search engines. Is an
extra $400 profit a week worth taking the time to learn how
to get high listings on search engines? It is to me!
Here
are a couple of tips on getting high listings on search engines: