by Branavan Ganesan

Created on: April 16, 2008

Unless you are in a fantasy movie about baseball, the mantra 'If you build it, they will come' does not apply. When you start a business or want your work to be noticed, advertising and social networking to spread the word are key elements to success.

What are my options on the web?

There are four key areas to focus on.
1. Search advertising
2. On-line banner ads

3. Targeted demographic email campaigns
4. Viral marketing

SEARCH ADVERTISING

More and more, companies are moving to the search advertising model over traditional methods such as radio, tv, mail, billboards and magazines. Why? Because these other models are very expensive and they do not target the user at the time that they are ready to make a purchase. If a user does a search on 'video ipod 40 GB' and you bring up the on-line ordering page for a 40 GB ipod classic, there is a very good chance that you'll get the user to make a purchase.

The most successful search campaign is the Google AdSense campaign. Company owners figure out what keywords their target audience is going to type in, then bid money on how much they will pay each time the user clicks on their item.

Note that the above method, paid search advertising, is only good in certain demographics. In some cases, doing good search engine optimization (SEO) and having a link to your product or work appear in the Google results can return high traffic and revenue.

Yahoo, MSN and Ask are the other three runner up searches. Advertising there makes sense only when your target market uses them more. For example, Yahoo is used much more for childcare products and family related products.

ON-LINE BANNER ADS

Think very carefully before you launch a banner ad campaign. The returns on banner ads have been dropping year over year, because users find them to be annoying and not useful. The primary reason is that a lot of the times the banner ad is not pertinent to what is on the page. A surprising trend in the UK shows that a large portion of high profile companies have stopped using banner ads - particularly in FaceBook - because their ads would show up on pages that had content that they did not agree with.

Bottom line: Make sure you do demographic research on the web site you are putting banner ads on to make sure that your ads will be seen by the people that will respond to them. If you can't find a niche site that is right in line with your product, save your money for viral marketing techniques and search advertising.

TARGETED DEMOGRAPHIC EMAIL CAMPAIGN

A targeted

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