Promotions – Demotions

Whenever you decide to start your business online, you face number of challenges, one of which is promotion. How to promote your website, legally and efficiently, especially, if your budget is tight, is always been a great deal for those, starting their first online business.

Depending on type of your business – whether its software, online or offline services, digital goods – there are number of strategies to do it the right way. The right way is legally – opposed to spamming, flooding and tricking people into visiting your site – with regards to your budget – or what kind of strategy can you really afford.

One of the most popular, but rather expensive ways is to use Google AdWords. Activation is 5 USD, but keywords can be rather expensive. Plus is that advertising is targeted, so you can direct it exactly on the region where you provide your goods or services. Minus, is that in addition to costs, you automatically cut off market of technically aware users, using Mozilla Firefox in composition with AdBlock plugin. The latter targets all kinds of ads, but it specifically targets most popular advertising services, such as Google AdWords.

Additionally, you can never be sure that your campaign is succeeded, while impressions and clicks are counted off your account. There is however, one smart service, called RankPay.com, that essentially raises your website popularity, according to chosen keywords, and ONLY after promotion is done, billing you for their services.

Plus here that you only pay for what you get, and that you can estimate full campaign costs at the beginning. Minus – investments could be rather substantial, even if you have to pay them after results. So if you chose to follow this way, be sure to estimate your profits and processing power – that includes both manpower and technical server characteristics – as well.

Another, much cheaper and very easy alternative is smaller advertising services, such as BuySellAds.com – brilliant advertising service. They have impressing amount of various resources in their catalogue, and prices suite any budget from 10 USD and up. It is really easy to install, and you are the one who chooses where to show your ads and how to pay for it (for clicks, or for periods).

Be aware when you pick your advertising company. There are ones that lose your time, and hence, money, providing little or no service in return. One of such services is Entre Card – a service oriented on promoting and monetizing blogs. Idea is simple: their ads on your blog, your ads on somebody else’s blog. You either buy “EC credits”, or earn them by visiting other blogs, writing comments and clicking banners. This seems logical, pay-to-surf; only instead of money you get credits – more shows of your ads on somebody else’s site.

Unfortunately, reality is a bit different. You keep their ads on your site for around a week, “awaiting moderators approval”, or waiting until crawl bots will fix up “another direct link to EC”, hence raising their page rank. Then, IF they accept you, you’ll fall into community of mostly private blogs, made on various free platforms – such as eBlogger, Ning, Etsy or tumblr. In that community, you will witness people who surf and click as much as possible, just to get more credits. You will also see people, who politely visit few sites per day, staying in the shadow, getting in return their small share of promotion.

General rule here – if you expect to actually promote your website, and hence your online presence, look for businessmen, small and fair, that expect to make money from you, and for you.