Make Highly Effective Advertising your #1 Priority

Highly effective advertising should always be your #1 priority.  It’s true that things like the product or service, customer satisfaction, a great website, etc. are all really important, but unless people know:

1. that you exist – and – 
2. that you have the product/service they need…

…you won’t have any business.

So it’s really important to focus a lot of attention on your advertising strategy, making sure that it’s really hitting the target you’re aiming for.

Thousands, maybe even millions of online entrepreneurs are making advertising just an afterthought.  They do things like using very cheap, generic traffic, click exchanges, and worse.  Their honest belief is that if they have a fantastic product and a great website, they can’t possibly fail.  Sound familiar?

But you most certainly can fail and many do.

Why do so many internet businesses fail?

Internet businesses fail for the same reasons that brick-and-mortar businesses fail.  They are in a niche that’s too competitive.  There’s not enough market for their product or service.  They don’t treat their customers the way they should.  Their accounts payable is always greater than their accounts receivable and they have a serious cash flow problem.  Do any of these sound familiar?

But the number one reason people fail in the world of internet businesses is advertising.

By that, I mean they either don’t do any, or their advertising just isn’t done right.  Internet business is highly competitive, so you need highly effective advertising to rise above the crowd.  You are often literally competing against hundreds of millions of others for the same piece of the pie.

If you don’t get visitors coming to your site, visitors who want what you offer, you’re sunk.

What can I do?

There are a number of things you can do.  The size of your marketing budget is a big factor in creating a plan.  

But one thing is certain:  everything must be directed at getting people who want what you offer to visit your site.  That means, more than anything else, getting people to click on your link in the search results.

Keyword and SEO pitfalls

First of all, that requires having the right keywords.  Don’t be fooled by unscrupulous “SEO experts” who promise to have you at the top of page one within a week for the keywords they choose for you!

A good example of their tricks would be the following scenario:

You live in Hyder, Alaska, population 87.  You are a translator, and want to go online to advertise your service.  You are fluent in English, German and Italian, so want to use your skills to earn a good income.  

You pay a professional to design and build a beautiful site for you that includes a nice blog, but after several weeks, you notice nothing is happening.  Nobody is visiting your site.

So you do some searching and discover that you need to do SEO (search engine optimization) in order to get your page high enough on the major search engines to be found.  Luckily for you, there are several who advertise that they will get you to the top of page one on Google for your keywords within a week.  They even show examples.

But the trick they use is to create the keywords, “translator in Hyder AK,” and “translation services in Hyder AK.”  Guess what?  They rocket to number one almost immediately.  But nobody is searching with those exact keywords, and you still get no traffic, unless someone among the 87 residents of Hyder needs a translator!

Use good keywords

I recommend that you take a little time to create your own keywords.  There are plenty of tools you can use for this, many of them free.  My favorite is simply to brainstorm for a while and create a list of keywords I might use if I was searching for my site.

Use “long-tail” keywords.  These are not really words, but phrases.  The days of using a single word for a keyword are gone, unless you can afford to bid really high for them on Google Ads.  But you would be surprised by how many people search using fairly long phrases.

You can take advantage of this by creating good, sensible key-phrases that have fewer competitors.  Just be careful not to choose any that have too few!

It is surprising how many people do not optimize using commonly searched key-phrases.  You can take advantage of that fact!  This is a big key in highly effective advertising.  Not only that, but if you’re doing the research, it’s highly effective free advertising.

Use Classified Advertising

Classified ads are still one of the most successful methods of advertising.  They are highly effective advertising, because they are truly laser-targeted.  People who click to your site from a classified ad are motivated, because they are looking for exactly what you’re offering.  They are far more likely to become customers of yours than almost any other kind of traffic, other than search engine traffic, which might be on a par.

Even better, there is a lot of free classified advertising offered online.  You will find that if you take the time to get good at crafting really well-worded ads, you can get a lot of business that way.  People still love to browse the classifieds to find what they want.

Even better, every time you place a free or paid classified ad, you can use your key-phrases and your link, which is excellent for your SEO, especially because of the back-links this creates.  Backlinks are links from another site pointing at your site.

Use SEO Plugins

SEO can be a big challenge for almost anyone.  But if you’re a WordPress user, which I highly recommend, there are plugins for that.  In fact, if you can think of something you’d like to be able to do with your WordPress website, look for a plugin.  There probably is one!

My favorite SEO plugin is Rank Math.  It’s a fairly new kid on the block compared to Yoast SEO, the all time favorite by a lot.  But it’s catching up really quickly as people discover its power.  Furthermore, it is completely free.

Does it provide highly effective advertising?  It has for me.  Yes, it has required work, but by following their clear instructions for each page, my rank for this site came up a lot in about a week, and one of my pages hit the number one a the top of the first page for my key-word and number two for another of my key-words.  That happened in less than two days!  That was at the top of about 420,000,000 results, so I’m pretty happy with it!

While Rank Math is my favorite, I give very high marks to Yoast SEO and Squirrly SEO.  Squirrly is a bit more complicated to use than the other two, but offers some very good insights.  Both Yoast and Squirrly offer much more with their paid upgrades.

Focus on highly effective advertising!

Remember, you can have the best offering in the world, the most beautiful website, and a ton of enthusiasm, but if you have no targeted visitors, you have no business.

Focus on highly effective advertising for your site and keep on focusing on that.  You will soon be on the road to success!