Chapter 10
Advertising and Publicity: The Basics
In This Chapter
Branding your business for success
Finding free advertising for businesses on a budget
Making the most of mailing lists and word of mouth
Placing banner ads
Every month — sometimes every week, it seems — the Internet spawns a new superstar. As I write this, the stars of the moment are featured in the “Two Girls and a Puppy” Facebook page. After losing their dog to cancer and asking their reluctant father for a new one, he challenged them to get a million Likes on a Facebook page. They posted a cute photo that had a simple message, a call to action, and provoked emotion. Within just seven hours, they managed to achieve their goal. (The puppy followed soon after.)
An article on Entrepreneur.com called “What Makes Your Video Shareable — and Viral” identified some traits common to things that get a lot of attention on the Internet: They generate emotion; they involve something that is startling and attention getting. The article suggested that to get attention, you need to “1. Be true, 2. Don’t waste our time, 3. Be unforgettable, and 4. Ultimately, it’s all about humanity.”
Marketers and businesspeople who try to attract attention online hope to create a gesture or slogan that becomes a meme — something easily imitated after being distributed on a web page or in a video.
Meme or not, the web can be a cost-effective way for a small business owner such as yourself to get a potential customer’s attention. Targeted, personalized public-relations efforts work online because cyberspace is a personal place where intimate communication is possible. Blanketed advertising strategies of the sort you see in other media (most notably display ads, commercials, or billboards) are expensive and don’t always work for online businesses. Why? They lack the personal edge you get with e-commerce. The web is a one-to-one communications medium. In this chapter, I describe cost-effective, do-it-yourself advertising techniques for the online entrepreneur who has a fledgling business on a tight budget.
Coming Up with a Marketing Strategy
Half the battle with running a successful online business is developing a plan for what you want to do. The next step is to get noticed. For many businesses, the plan frequently involves getting people to talk about you — to promote “viral marketing” in which consumers sing your praises. The following sections describe two strategies for making your company name more visible to online customers and promoting word-of-mouth publicity.
Choosing a brand that speaks for you
In business-speak, branding has nothing to do with cattle roundups and everything to do with jacking up your profits. Branding is the process of raising awareness of a company’s name and logo through advertising, public relations, or other means (for example, getting people to say, “Did you hear about . . .?” and then mentioning you, your products, your website, and so on).
Despite recent economic crises, the web is a great place for developing a business brand. A study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (www.iab.net) reported that advertising revenue (the amount that businesses spend to advertise online) reached $9.26 billion for the third quarter of that year — a substantial increase of 18 percent over the same period in the previous year. The report states that the figures are a "testament to the value marketers get from using digital media.
Online advertising works because you don’t have to get potential shoppers to dress up, drive across town, and find a parking spot. Web users sit only a foot or two from the screen (or only inches away, if they’re using a handheld device), which means your web page can easily get a user’s undivided attention — if your content is compelling enough, that is. Don’t be shy about providing links to click, thumbnail images to view, and the like. (Just be sure to place these items where they work best; see Chapter 11 for more about that.) Previous studies have found that web advertising that doesn’t seem like advertising — that is, it’s interactive and entertaining — is supported and liked by consumers. These studies also showed that brands advertised on the web were seen as forward thinking.
But don’t rely on your web page alone to spread your name. Use the whole Internet — including e-mail, online communities, contests, and promotions. These days you have plenty of options to get the word out about your online business, such as the following:
Blogs: These are online diaries that you can create to encourage connections with your customers and other interested individuals; you can use them to build visibility and generate advertising revenue.
Social networking: More and more businesses are using popular places such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to promote themselves and their products.
Banner ads: This type of ad is similar to the traditional print ads you place in a newspaper. See the “Waving a banner ad” section, later in this chapter, for more information.
Classifieds: You can advertise your goods on a classified ad site such as Craigslist (www.craigslist.org).
Interstitials: These pop-up ads appear in a separate window while a web page is loading.
Pop-ups are fairly common on the web, but many users strongly dislike them and set their browsers to disallow them. Such ads also slow down the browsing/shopping process, which dampens the enthusiasm of impulse buyers. Before you use them, consider both the upside and downside, as described in the “Pop-up (and under, and over) ads” section, later in this chapter.
Keyword searches: You can learn how search services work so that you can make your site appear more prominently in search results.
Newsletters: You can generate goodwill and drive business to your website by distributing an e-mail newsletter.
Partnerships: Find businesses whose goods and services complement yours and create links on each other’s websites.
A website can also promote a brand that has already become well known through traditional sales and marketing strategies. The click-and-mortar version of Walmart (www.walmart.com) works in conjunction with the giant retailer's many brick-and-mortar stores. The website provides a selection of styles and sizes that's generally wider than what customers can find in stores. The National Retail Federation's Stores magazine (www.stores.org) ranked Wal-Mart number 1 among all retail stores, with almost $454 million in revenue in 2012.
You may not have thousands of dollars to spend on banner ads, but they aren’t the most effective forms of online advertising anymore, anyway. It’s just as effective to start with some simple, cost-effective techniques like this one: Make sure your signature files, domain name, and e-mail address all refer to your company name as closely as possible. It may take a while for your business to develop name awareness among consumers, but these techniques give you a perfect way to start.
Being selective about your audience
Traditional broadcast advertising, such as commercials or radio spots, works kind of like standing on top of a tall building and screaming, “Hey, everyone, come to my store!” Such ads deliver short bits of information to huge numbers of people — everyone in the coverage areas who happens to be tuned in at a particular time. The Internet has its own form of broadcasting — getting your company mentioned or advertised on one of the sites that draws millions of visitors each day.
But where the Internet really excels is in one-to-one communication of the kind that TV and radio can’t touch. I suggest you try your own personalized forms of online advertising before you attempt to blanket cyberspace with banner ads. Often you can reach small, targeted groups of people — or even one prospect at a time — through free, do-it-yourself marketing strategies. These strategies include using the right keywords, sending newsletters, and taking part in mailing lists and newsgroups, all of which I discuss in the next section.
Painting a new business scenario
Marques Vickers has appeared in this book through several editions when he was primarily an artist based in California. His life has changed dramatically, and though he says he doesn’t spend as much time online as he used to, he’s an example of someone who has been able to change his life and circumstances profoundly, in part through the web. “I can clearly say that Internet access enabled me to pursue my present course even if it meant shifting directions,” he declares.
Through his self-named website (www.marquesv.com), he still markets his own painting, sculpture, and photography, as well as his books on marketing and buying fine art online. In 2009, he became an auction consultant, using eBay to market both paintings and collectible items; his new site is at www.artsinamerica.com. He first went online in November 1999, and his art-related sites have received anywhere from 25,000 to 40,000 visits per month.
Q. What have you done to market your work in a difficult economy?
A. Time is the lone commodity we often have control of, so I am focusing my selling activities on areas that are truly productive, and I pay greater attention to the response from advertising. Essentially, time management is my greatest form of cost control.
Q. What are the costs of running all your websites and doing the associated marketing?
A. Out-of-pocket expense is approximately $29 monthly for a website hosting and Internet access package. New domain name registrations and renewals probably add another $250 because I own more than 20 domain names.
Q. What would you describe as the primary goals of your online business?
A. My initial objective was to develop a personalized, round-the-clock global presence in order to recruit sales outlets, sell directly to the public, and create a reference point for people to access and view my work. I also have an intuitive sense that an online website presence will be a marketing necessity for any future visual artist and a lifelong exposure outlet. Having an online presence builds my credibility as a fine artist and positions me to take advantage of the evolution of the fine-arts industry, too.
Q. Has your online business been profitable financially?
A. Absolutely — but make no mistake, achieving sales volume and revenue is a trial-and-error process and involves a significant time commitment. I’m still perfecting the business model, and it may require years to achieve the optimum marketing plan.
Q. How do you promote your site?
A. With the Internet, you are layering a collective web of multiple promotional sources. Experimentation is essential because recognition is not always immediate but may ultimately be forthcoming because postings in cyberspace are often stumbled across from unforeseen resources. I try multiple marketing outlets including paid ad positioning services, such as Overture and Google, bartered advertising space, and reciprocally traded links. Some have had moderate success, some unforeseen and remarkable exposure. Unlike traditional advertising media that have immediate response times, the Internet may lag in its response. It is a long-term commitment and one that cannot be developed by short-term tactics or media blitzes.
Q. Do you create your web pages yourself or do you work with someone to do that?
A. I’m too particular about the quality of content to subcontract the work out. Besides, I know what I want to say, how I want to say it, and am capable of fashioning the design concepts I want to integrate. The rectangular limitations of HTML design make color a very important component, and the very minimal attention span of most web viewers means that you’d better get to the point quickly and concisely. The more personalized, timely, and focused your content, the more reason an individual has to return to your website and ultimately understand your unique vision of what you’re trying to create. A website is an unedited forum for telling your version of a story and a means for cultivating a direct support base.
Q. How are you using the web these days?
A. A few years ago, I uprooted from Northern California with my wife, and we moved to the Languedoc region of southern France. I decided to focus my activities on areas more interesting to me and pursue a completely different direction. Much of the process is detailed in a column I write called "An American in the French Languedoc" (www.the-languedoc-page.com/articles/languedoc-articles01g.htm). I am still doing my artwork, but my primary "work" is buying and renovating houses (www.uniqueseek.com). I've taken a decided step back from the pace of Northern California. I still use the Internet for promoting the houses I renovate, however.
Q. What advice would you give to someone starting an online business?
A. Don’t hesitate one minute longer than necessary. Read substantially and from a diverse selection of sources on the subject. Subscribe to e-zines on related subject matter and query the webmasters of sites that impress you with their content. Go to informational seminars; ask questions. Distribute your message to multiple outlets, but focus your time and energy on what works best. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Established sales outlets are usually best. The Internet is here to stay, and we have just scratched the surface in terms of potential.
Publicizing Your Online Business Free
In the following sections, I describe some ways you can publicize your online business yourself — for free. Prepare, however, to devote several hours a week to corresponding by e-mail and applying to have your business listed in search services, Internet indexes, or websites that have a customer base similar to yours.
The best way to generate first-time and return visits to your business site is to make yourself useful as well as ornamental. The longer people are inclined to stay on your website, the more likely they are to acquire your goods or services. (See Chapter 5 for some specific suggestions on generating compelling, useful content.)
A newsletter for next to nothing
It used to be said that the pen is mightier than the sword, but these days nothing beats a well-used mouse. No longer do you have to spend time and money to print a newsletter on actual paper and distribute it around the neighborhood. Now that you’re online, you can say what you want — as often as you want — with your own publication. Online newsletters also help meet your clients’ customer service needs, as I discuss in Chapter 8.
Many of the suggestions in this section apply to an even easier way of getting the word out: creating a blog. With a blog, you don’t have to worry about design, distribution, and organization issues, either; you just have to focus on putting out content that your readers actually find useful and that encourages them to return on a regular basis.
Publish or perish
The work of producing an online newsletter is offset by the benefits you get in return. You may obtain hundreds — even thousands — of subscribers who find out about you and your online business.
To run your publishing venture smoothly, however, consider these areas:
Topics: If you run out of topics to write about, look to others for inspiration. Identify magazines in your field of business so that you can quote articles. Get on the mailing list for any press releases you can use.
Staff: You don’t have to do it all. Delegate the editing function to someone else, or line up colleagues to function as contributors.
Design: You have two choices: Send a plain-text version that doesn’t look pretty but that everyone can read easily, or send a formatted HTML version that looks like a web page but is readable only by people who can receive formatted e-mail. Keep in mind, though, that many users are on corporate e-mail systems that either discourage or prohibit HTML-formatted e-mail. Others don’t like HTML e-mail because it takes longer to download the graphics files.
Audience: Identify your readers and make sure that your content is useful to them. (This last item certainly applies to business blogs: Save the personal news about your trip to Ibiza or your new puppy for a personal blog; focus on your area of expertise and present news and tips for readers who are interested in them.)
Newsletters work only if they appear on a regular basis and they consistently maintain a high level of quality. Whether yours comes out every week, every month, or just once a year, your subscribers expect you to re-create your publication with every new issue. Keep your newsletter simple and make sure you have the resources to follow through.
Extra! Read all about it!
After you do your planning, the actual steps involved in creating your newsletter are pretty straightforward. Because you’re just starting out, I suggest you concentrate on producing only a plain-text version of your newsletter. Later on, you can think about doing an HTML version as well.
People like receiving inside tips and suggestions in plain text; they're happy that they don't have to wait for graphics files to download. On the other hand, a simple layout with colors and small photos can work well. Figure 10-1 shows an example: The Chicago publishing house that published my book Literary Chicago uses a two-column arrangement for its user-friendly newsletter. It's a standard layout provided by the e-mail marketing service Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com).
Before you do anything, check with your ISP to make sure that you’re permitted to have a mailing-list publication. Even if your newsletter consists of a simple announcement that you send only once in a while (in contrast to a discussion list, which operates pretty much constantly), you’ll be sending a lot more e-mail messages through your ISP’s machines than you otherwise would.
Keep the size of your newsletters small; about 30KB is the biggest e-mail file you can comfortably send. If you absolutely must have a larger newsletter, break it into two or three separate e-mail messages. Reducing the file size of your newsletter keeps your readers from getting irritated about how long your message takes to download or open. And keeping your customers happy should be one of your highest business priorities.
Figure 10-1: An e-mail newsletter typically begins with a heading, a horizontal divider, and a table of contents.
When you’re all set with the prep work, follow these general steps for an overview of how to create and distribute your publication:
1. Open a plain-text editor, such as Notepad (Windows) or SimpleText (Mac).
2. Start typing.
Just because your newsletter is in plain text doesn’t mean that you can’t spice it up. Consider the following low-tech suggestions for emphasizing text or separating one section from another:
• All caps: Using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS is always useful for distinguishing the name of the newsletter or heads from subheads.
• Rules: You can create horizontal rules by typing a row of equal signs, hyphens, or asterisks to separate sections.
• Blank spaces: Used carefully, that lowly spacebar on your keyboard can help you center plain text or divide it into columns.
Be sure to proofread the whole newsletter before sending it. Better yet, ask an objective viewer to read the text for you. Ask him or her to make suggestions on content, organization, and format, as well as to look for typos.
3. Save your file.
4. Open your e-mail program’s address book, select the mailing list of recipients, and compose a new message to them.
5. Attach your newsletter to the message or paste it into the body of the message, and click Send.
If you're sending many e-mail messages simultaneously, be sure to do your mailing at a time when Internet traffic isn't heavy. Many popular newsletters, such as eWeek News, go out on weekends, for example. Other e-commerce providers, such as 1ShoppingCart.com (www.1shoppingcart.com).
Don’t flood your Internet service provider’s mail server with hundreds or thousands of messages at one time; you may crash the server. Break the list into smaller batches and send them at different times.
Be sure to mention your newsletter on your web page and provide an e-mail address where people can subscribe to it. In the beginning, you can ask people to send subscription requests to you. If your list swells to hundreds of members, consider automated mailing-list software or a mailing-list service to manage your list.
Participating in mailing lists and newsgroups
Many areas of the Internet can provide you with direct access to potential customers and let you interact with them. Two of the best places to market yourself directly to individuals are mailing lists and newsgroups. Both are highly targeted and offer unprecedented opportunities for niche marketing. Using them takes a little creativity and time on your part, but the returns can be significant.
Get started by developing a profile of your potential customer. Then join and participate in lists and newsgroups that may provide customers for your online business. For example, if you sell memorabilia of movie stars to fans online, you may want to join some newsgroups started by the fans themselves.
Where can you find these discussion forums? Topica (lists.topica.com) maintains a mailing-list directory that you can search by name or topic; it includes thousands of mailing lists. (Topica also helps you create your own e-mail newsletter, by the way.) Refdesk.com (www.refdesk.com) maintains links to websites, organized by category, that help you locate and participate in newsgroups, mailing lists, and web forums.
Managing your mailing list
When you decide to host and run your own mailing list, you assume the responsibility of processing requests to subscribe and unsubscribe from the list. This venture can eat into the time you need to spend on other business activities. When mailing lists get to be too much to handle yourself, you have a couple of options to make life easier:
Purchase special mailing-list software. This type of program automatically adds or subtracts individuals from a mailing list in response to special e-mail messages that they send to you. You can usually manage the mailing list from your home computer. If you're a Windows user, check out SendBlaster (www.sendblaster.com). Mac users can try Direct Mail (www.directmailmac.com).
Hire a company to run your mailing list for you. Even though mailing-list software can help reduce the work involved in maintaining a list, you still have to install and use the software. So if you're really strapped for time, hiring a company to take care of your mailing list may be the way to go. Check out Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp) or Lyris ListHosting (www.lyris.com/us-en/products) for pricing information.
A few newsgroups (in particular, the ones with biz at the beginning of their names) focus on small business issues and sales:
misc.entrepreneurs
biz.marketplace.discussion
biz.marketplace.international.discussion
biz.marketplace.services.discussion
alt.business.home
alt.business.consulting
aol.commerce.general
The easiest way to access newsgroups is to use Google’s web-based directory (groups.google.com). Each browser or newsgroup program has its own steps for enabling you to access discussion groups in an extensive network called Usenet. Use your browser’s online help system to find out how you can access newsgroups.
Mailing lists
A mailing list is a group of individuals who receive communications by e-mail. Two kinds of mailing lists are common online:
Discussion lists: These are lists of people interested in a particular topic. People subscribe to the list and have messages on the topic delivered by e-mail. Each message sent to the list goes to everyone in the group. Each person can reply either to the original sender or to everyone in the group. The resulting series of messages on a topic is called a thread.
Announcement lists: These lists provide only one-way communication. Recipients get a single message from the list administrator, such as an attached e-mail newsletter.
Discussion lists are often more specific in topic than newsgroups. These lists vary from very small lists to lists that include thousands of people. An example of a discussion list is ROOTS-L, which is a mailing list for individuals who are researching family history. People on this list exchange inquiries about ancestors that they’re seeking and announce family tree information they’ve posted online.
By making contributions to a mailing list, you establish a presence, so when members are looking to purchase the kind of goods or services you offer, they’re likely to come to you rather than to a stranger. By participating in the lists that are right for you, you also find out invaluable information about your customers’ needs and desires. Use this information to fine-tune your business so that it better meets those needs and desires.
Marketing through lists and newsgroups requires a low-key approach. Participating by answering questions or contributing your opinion to ongoing discussion topics is far more effective than blatant self-promotion.
Always read the welcome message and list guidelines that you receive upon joining a mailing list. Figure out the rules before you post. Lurk in the background for a few weeks to get a feel for the topics and participants before you contribute. Let your four-to-six-line signature file establish your identity without selling your wares directly. Also, don’t forget to spell-check and proofread your messages before you send them.
Discussion groups
Discussion groups provide a different form of online group participation. On the Internet, you can find discussion groups in Usenet. America Online and CompuServe also have their own systems of discussion groups that are separate from Usenet. One of the easiest ways to access newsgroups, however, is with your web browser. Just point it to Google Groups (groups.google.com). Many large corporations and other organizations maintain their own internal discussion groups as well. In any case, you can also access discussion groups with your web browser’s newsgroup or e-mail software. Microsoft Outlook Express can connect to newsgroup postings, for example.
You can promote yourself and your business in discussion groups in the same way that you use mailing lists: by participating in the group, providing helpful advice and comments, and answering questions. Don’t forget that newsgroups are great for fun and recreation, too; they’re a good way to solve problems, get support, and make new friends. For more information on newsgroups, see Chapter 3.
A contest in which everyone’s a winner
In Chapter 13, I describe how Jason Bolt, the young owner of Society43, uses contests and other Facebook promotions to attract attention to his online sunglasses business. Remember that everyone loves to receive something for free. Holding a contest can attract visitors to your website, where they can find out about the rest of your offerings — the ones you offer for sale, that is.
You don’t have to give away cars or trips around the world to get attention. Contests and giveaways are great ways to attract click-happy online shoppers. The floral site 1-800-Flowers.com, which has more than 670,000 “Likes” on Facebook, frequently holds contests there. So does Society43. Founder Jason Bolt knows it’s a great way to build loyalty and keep shoppers returning to his website or Facebook page, especially since his fans love competition anyway.
“Product giveaways coupled with a competition are always our most popular promotions on Facebook,” he comments. “Our fans are very passionate about sports and inherently competitive. Our most successful promotion to date involved a chance to win a pair of Limited Edition Oregon Chrome 43s. It was viewed by over 10,000 fans and shared 582 times.”
Cybersurfers regularly take advantage of freebies online by downloading shareware or freeware programs. They get free advice from newsgroups, and they find free companionship from chat rooms and online forums. Having already paid for network access and computer equipment, they actually expect to get something for free.
Your customers will keep coming back if you devise as many promotions, giveaways, or sales as possible. You can also get people to interact through online forums or other tools, as I describe in Chapter 5.
A 16-year-old cartoonist named Gabe Martin put his cartoons on his website, called The Borderline. Virtually nothing happened. But when his dad put up some money for a contest, young Gabe started getting hundreds of visits and inquiries. He went on to create 11 mirror sites (sites that provide duplicated information) around the world, develop a base of devoted fans, contribute to newspapers such as The San Diego Union-Tribune, and sell his own cartoon book. (You can read a brief bio at www.care2.com/ecards/bio/1022.)
Waving a banner ad
I'm not as big a fan of traditional banner ads as I am of the other strategies that I discuss in this chapter — especially where small entrepreneurial businesses are concerned. But banner ads have hardly gone away. You see them on the free versions of mobile apps, and on popular sites such as YouTube (www.youtube.com). This venue reportedly attracts 790 million unique visitors per month, so it's a nearly irresistible place for advertisers. In general, though, banner ads are being used online less frequently than targeted ads — that is, ads that appear when specified keyword searches are conducted on sites such as Google (www.google.com) and Ask.com (www.ask.com).
Banner ads are like the traditional print ads you might take out in local newspapers. In limited cases, banner ads are free, as long as you or a designer can create one. Otherwise, you have to pay to place them on someone else’s web page, the same way you pay to take out an ad in a newspaper or magazine.
Even these days, however, many commercial operations do use banner ads successfully on the web. Banner ads can be effective promotional tools under certain circumstances:
If you pay enough money to keep them visible in cyberspace for a long period of time
If you pay the high rates charged by the most successful websites, which can steer you the most traffic
Banner ads differ from other web-specific publicity tactics in one important respect: They publicize in a one-to-many rather than a one-to-one fashion. Banner ads broadcast the name of an organization indiscriminately, without requiring the viewer to click a link or in some respect choose to find out about the site.
Anteing up
You have to pay the piper to play the banner ad game. In general, websites have two methods of charging for banner ads:
CPM, or cost per thousand: This is a way of charging for advertising based on the number of people who visit the web page on which your ad appears. The more visits the website gets, the higher the ad rates that site can charge. In this type of advertising, you have to pay depending on the number of times your ad is viewed, regardless of whether anyone clicks it to actually visit your site.
CTR, or clickthrough rate: A clickthrough occurs when someone clicks a banner ad that links to your (the advertiser’s) website. (Virtually all banner ads are linked this way.) In this case, you are billed after the ad has run for a while and the clicks have been tallied.
Say that 100,000 people visit the site on which your banner runs. If the site charges a flat $20 CPM rate, your banner ad costs $2,000 (100 × $20). If the same site charges a $1 per clickthrough rate, and 2 percent of the 100,000 visitors click through to your site (the approximate average for the industry), you pay the same: $2,000 (2,000 × $1).
Obviously, the more popular the site on which you advertise, the more your ad costs. Back in 1999, when Yahoo! was still publishing its advertising rates online, it charged a CPM rate of $20 to $50 for each 1,000 visits to the Yahoo! page on which the banner ad appeared. If the page on which your banner runs received 500,000 visits, such ads could cost $10,000 to $25,000. Not all advertising sites are so expensive, of course.
These days, many advertisers are following Google’s lead and charging for ads with a cost per click (CPC) model, or some form of CPC. CPC is similar to CTR in that you, the advertiser, pay when someone clicks a link or graphic image that takes that person to your website. But the big difference is that in Google’s CPC model, you determine how much you pay for each click; in traditional CTR, the advertisers set the rates. In this system, the advertiser pays only when someone actually clicks an ad. In the case of Google’s AdWords program (adwords.google.com), the amount paid per click is one that the advertiser decides by placing a bid on keywords used to display the ad. See Chapter 11 for more information on AdWords.
CPM rates are difficult to calculate because of the number of repeat visitors a site typically receives. For example, a web page designer may visit the same site a hundred times in a day when testing scripts and creating content. If the site that hosts your ad charges a rate based on CPM, make sure the site weeds out such repeat visits. You’re better off advertising on sites that charge on not only a CPM but also a clickthrough basis — or, better yet, only on a clickthrough basis. The combination of CPM and CTR is harder for the hosting site to calculate but ultimately fairer for you, the advertiser.
Positioning banner ads can be a substantial investment, so be sure that your ad appears on a page whose visitors are likely to be interested in your company. If your company sells automotive parts, for example, get on one of the Yahoo! automotive index pages.
Designing your ad
The standard “medium rectangle” and “large rectangle” banner ads are traditional. Some standard square configurations or small, button-like shapes are common, too. These days, ads appear on the side of a page (often on the right, as on Facebook) and they are relatively small. The measurements for ads usually appear in pixels. An inch contains roughly 72 pixels, so a 110-x-80-pixel ad (the size seen on Facebook) is less than 2 inches wide and about 1 inch high.
The rectangular ads appear most often at the top of a web page, so they load first while other page contents have yet to appear; smaller ads may appear anywhere on a page. (Ensuring that your ad appears at the top of a web page is always a good idea.)
Many banner ads combine photographic images, type, and color in a graphically sophisticated way. However, simple ads can be effective as well. You can create your ad yourself if you have some experience with a graphics program such as PaintShop Pro. (You can download a trial copy of PaintShop Pro at www.corel.com.)
Need some help creating your own banner ad? If you have only a simple, text-only ad in mind and you don't have a lot of money to spend on design, try a create-your-own-banner-ad service or software program. I've had mixed results with the online banner-ad services such as The Banner Generator, provided for free by Prescient Code Solutions (www.coder.com/creations/banner). See Figure 10-2 for an ad that I created in just a couple of minutes by using a shareware program called Banner Maker Pro (www.bannermakerpro.com).
Figure 10-2: With the right choice of color, a text-only banner ad can look good.
Profiting from someone else’s banner ads
Banner ads may be out of favor, but they’re not dead by any means. When used economically and targeted to the right audience, banner ads can help you achieve one of your goals: attracting visitors to your website. Attract enough visitors, and banner ads can help you achieve another, even more important goal: making money.
If you attract thousands or (if you’re lucky) even millions of visitors to your site each month, you become an attractive commodity to advertisers looking to gain eye space for their own banner advertisements. By having another business pay you to display their ads, you can generate extra revenue with very little effort.
Of course, the effort involved in soliciting advertisers, placing ads, keeping track of how many visitors to your site actually click ads, and getting paid is considerable — but you don’t have to manage ads yourself.
For John Moen, owner of a pair of map-related websites (including Graphic Maps), the move from marketing his own website to becoming an advertiser came when his WorldAtlas.com (www.worldatlas.com) site began to attract 3 million hits per month. He turned to advertising giant DoubleClick by Google (www.doubleclick.com) to serve the ads and handle the maintenance.
“We place DoubleClick’s banner code on our pages, and DoubleClick pays us monthly for page impressions, direct clicks, page hits, and the like,” says John. “DoubleClick also provides a daily report on site traffic. With [its] reports, I can tell which page gets the most hits and at what time of day. Banner advertising now pays very well.”
Using Guerrilla Marketing Strategies
I didn’t make up the term guerilla marketing. As you may already know, the term appears in the titles of a series of popular books by Jay Conrad Levinson and Michael McLaughlin. It appears to be a buzzword that encompasses many (actually sensible) marketing techniques — from providing good customer service to knowing what your competition is doing. It also means going beyond the passive placement of ads on web pages or other venues and taking a proactive, aggressive approach to getting your business name and brand in the marketplace. With competition growing all the time among online businesses, it pays to know all the options when dealing with online advertising — including the ones I describe in this section.
Pop-up (and under, and over) ads
You’ve probably experienced it: the moment you connect to a website, a window pops up on your computer with an ad. Other sites typically urge you to sign up for news alerts or subscribe to a newsletter. Anything you can do to induce your visitors to identify themselves and provide contact information, from an e-mail address to a street address, is to your advantage.
Many web surfers consider pop-up ads a bane, and some utilities — like the Google add-on browser toolbar and firewalls like Norton Internet Security, as well as browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox — can block them from appearing in the first place. But they can still get through to some individuals who don’t have software configured to block them. And if your website becomes popular enough, a company will approach you about placing its ad on your page, either as a banner ad that is part of the page or as a window that does one of several things:
Pops up: This type of ad window is probably the most common. It appears when a page is viewed and pops up atop the page you want to view. These ads work best when their content is related to the page you’ve opened: Subscribe to our newsletter, buy our book, attend our seminar, or other supplementary information.
Pops under: When you open web pages on many sites that display ads, a new window opens. But this window, which contains an ad unrelated to the web page, opens underneath the primary window. Its content is visible only when the user specifically tries to close it, or closes or minimizes the other window(s) sitting on top of it.
Pops on top: These ads, also called interstitials, totally replace the content you want to view. You are forced to look at them for a period of time and close them before you can view the page you want to see. I see these ads used on online magazines. When you click an article, a totally new window appears, with animated content, and big enough that it completely covers the article you want to read. You have to close the ad window to keep reading. You can read more about interstitials at whatis.techtarget.com/definition/interstitial-in-between.
John Moen told me that he has received criticism for pop-up and other ads on his clip-art site. But there’s a trade-off here: The ad revenue makes it possible for him to keep creating the art and offering it for free. In the end, whether consumers realize it or not, they benefit from the ads because they get free art. All they have to do is click the close box to delete the window that pops up.
Adding life to your ads
Ads that appear on billboards, the sides of buildings, the sides of buses, the lights on top of cabs, and the pages of newspapers and magazines have one thing in common: They basically sit there and don’t do anything. They can have lights pointed at them, and magazine ads for perfumes can be scented — but that’s about it.
On the web, ads can be interactive in several different ways. The aim is to gain more attention from the hurried web surfer who is, after all, looking for something else on the current web page. You see several examples of interactive ads on the SteelHouse website (www.steelhouse.com). This company creates interactive ads for businesses. For example, go to the home page of SteelHouse client Mackenzie Limited (www.mackenzieltd.com) and you'll see a series of products for sale slide across the top of the page. These might include "interaction points" as well as YouTube videos, carousels, count-down timers, and social media icons.
Creating ads that appear to move around is easy, although you shouldn't expect them to look as elegant as those created by a professional designer. You need software that's used to create animated GIF images, such as GIF Construction Set Professional, a Windows-only program available for $24.99 (www.mindworkshop.com/gifcon.html), or the Mac application GIF.gIf.giF, available for $28 (www.peda.com/ggg). When you create the initial ad image and save it in GIF format, you create a series of variations and string them together to create the animation. The animation software leads you through the process.
Minding Your Ps and Qs (Puns and Quips)
What attracts shoppers to your business and encourages them to place orders from thousands of miles away? It’s what you have to sell and how you present it. But how can customers understand what you’re selling if they speak a different language? You must make your site accessible to all your potential customers.
Speaking their language
Put yourself in your customer’s place. Suppose that you’re from Spain. You speak a little English, but Spanish is your native tongue, and other Romance languages, such as French or Italian, are definitely easier for you to understand than English. You’re surfing around an Internet shopping mall and you come across sentences such as
Hey, ratchet-jaws. Shoot me some e-mail with your handle, and steer clear of Smokeys with ears.
Whatever. All you home boys will be down with my superfly jive.
Like, this cable modem is totally awesome to the max.
Get the picture? Your use of slang and local dialect may have customers from your own hometown or region in stitches, but it can leave many more people scratching their heads and clicking to the next site. The first rule in making your site accessible to a worldwide audience is to keep your language simple so that people from all walks of life — and various places on the planet — can understand you.
Using the right salutations
First impressions mean a lot. The way you address someone can mean the difference between getting off on the right foot and stumbling over your shoelaces. The following useful tidbits are from the International Addresses and Salutations web page (www.bspage.com/address.html), which, in turn, borrowed them from Merriam-Webster's Guide to International Business Communications:
In Austria, address a man as Herr and a woman as Frau; don’t use Fräulein for business correspondence.
In southern Belgium, use Monsieur or Madame to address someone, but the language spoken in northern Belgium is Flemish, so be sure to use De heer (Mr.) when addressing a man, or Mevrouw, abbreviated Mevr. (Mrs.) when addressing a woman.
In India, use Shri (Mr.) or Shrimati (Mrs.). Don’t use a given name unless you’re a relative or close friend.
In Japan, given names aren’t used in business. Use the family name followed by the job title. Or add -san to the family name (for example, Fujita-san) or the even-more-respectful -sama (Fujita-sama).
Adding multilingual content to your website is a nice touch, particularly if you deal on a regular basis with customers or clients from a particular area. Regional differences abound, so it’s prudent to find someone familiar with the area you’re trying to target and ask that person to read your text before you put it up on the web. Let a friend — not the absence of orders for your goods — tell you that you’ve committed a cultural faux pas. That way, you can fix it before you put it out there.
Making your site multilingual
One of the best ways to expand your business to other countries is to provide alternative translations of your content. You can either hire someone to prepare the text in one or more selected languages or use a computer program to do the work for you. Then provide links to the web pages that contain the translated text right on your site’s home page, like this:
Read this page in:
French
Spanish
German
One translation utility that’s particularly easy to use — and free — is available from Microsoft’s search service Bing. Just follow these steps to get your own instant translation:
1. Connect to the Internet, launch your web browser, and go to www.bing.com/translator.
The Bing Translator page appears.
2. If you have specific text you want to translate, type the text in the left box or copy and paste it from a word processing program; if you want the service to translate an entire web page, type or copy and paste the URL in the same text box.
Be sure to include the first part of the URL (for example, www.mysite.com rather than just mysite.com).
Obviously, the shorter and simpler the text, the better your results.
3. Choose the translation path (that is, from what language you want to translate) by clicking the Translate from or Translate to drop-down list.
At this writing, the service offers translation to or from 39 languages, including Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
4. Click the Translate button.
Almost as fast as you can say “Welcome to the new Tower of Babel,” a new web page appears onscreen with the foreign-language version of your text. (If you selected a web page to translate, it appears in the new language. The title of the page, however, remains in the original language.)
A computer can never be as good as a human being when it comes to language translation. I once tried to translate my own web page into French, showed it to a friend who is a native speaker, and watched her laugh at the results. If you try a computer translation, attempt only the simplest of sentences. And get someone who really understands the language to proofread the results.
Instead of creating a foreign-language version of your web page, you can provide a link to the Yahoo! translation page on your own page. That way, your visitors can translate your text for themselves.
You can download the software behind the translation service, Systran Translator, from the SYSTRAN Software, Inc., website (www.systransoft.com). The program costs anywhere from $69 to $749 depending on the number of languages you need. It is available for Windows only and requires at least a 1.2 Ghz processor, at least 1 to 2GB of RAM, and at least 500MB of hard drive space and 90MB of space per language pair during installation. If you need translation to or from Japanese, Chinese, or Korean (or from Russian to English), look into SYSTRAN Premium Translator, which starts at $899. This program has the same software requirements as the less expensive Personal package, as well as a driver for displaying Asian fonts, which is essential if you're translating into Asian languages.
You don't have to translate your entire website. Just providing an alternative version of your home page may be sufficient. The important thing is to give visitors an overview of your business and a brief description of your products and services in a language they can understand. Always include a mailto link (see Chapter 5) so that people can send mail to you. However, if you aren't prepared to receive a response in Kanji or Swahili, request that your guests send their message in a language you can read.
Although you probably don’t have sufficient resources to pay for a slew of translation services, having someone translate your home page so that you can provide an alternative version may be worthwhile — especially if you sell products that are likely to be desirable to a particular market where a different language is the order of the day. Consider hiring a competent graduate student to do some translation for you. Plenty of translation services are available online. Yahoo! has an index of translation services at
dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Translation_Services/Website_Translation
Using the right terms
Sometimes communicating effectively with someone from another country is a matter of knowing the terms used to describe important items in that language. The names of the documents you use to draw up an agreement or pay a bill are often very different in other countries than they are in your own. For example, if you’re an American merchant and someone from Europe asks you to provide a pro forma invoice, you may not know what the person wants. You’re used to hearing the document in question called a quote.
When you and your European buyer have come to terms, a commercial invoice is an official form you may need to use for billing purposes. Many of these forms have to do with large-scale export/import trade, and you may never have to use them. But if you do undertake trade with people overseas, be aware that they may require you to use their own forms, not yours, to seal the deal. To avoid confusion later on, ask your overseas clients about any special requirements that pertain to business documents before you proceed too far with the transaction.
Marketing through global networking
Jeffrey Edelheit knows the potential for making connections around the world by taking advantage of the networking value of the World Wide Web. Edelheit, a business planning and development consultant based in Sebastopol, California, supports fledgling entrepreneurs' dreams of getting their businesses off the ground. You can find some of his advice for small business owners on the Bplans.com website, which is associated with the Business Plan Pro software product (http://help.bplans.com/ask-bplans). He also helps established businesspeople extend their reach by looking at ways of gaining greater market exposure — including going online. In addition, he works closely with management and staff to develop the internal systems necessary to build a strong operational base for the company.
Edelheit provides the following guidance:
Be deliberate in the creation of your website. “I’ve worked with clients who are able to attract overseas customers and express themselves through creating their own websites,” he says. A well-thought-out website can create a relationship between you and your customers; in other words, the stronger the relationship, the greater the opportunity for sales.
Know your market. “The most important suggestion I can make,” Edelheit says, “is to know the overseas market that you want to reach and be aware of the issues associated with doing business there. I recommend getting contact information for an international trade group from the country’s consulate.”
Research shipping costs and regulations. Shipping costs and restrictions are among the most common problems new businesspeople encounter when dealing with foreign customers, he says. “Check with the U.S. Customs Service and find out what the duty charges are before you ship overseas. Once, in the ’80s, a company I was working with shipped an IBM computer to Sweden, but because there were still restrictions on exporting high-tech equipment, I nearly got arrested by U.S. Customs for not having received the required special clearance.”
Avoid being ethnocentric. “Also be aware of how consumers in other cultures regard your products,” he suggests. Make sure that nothing about your products would be considered offensive or bad luck to someone from another part of the world.
Be visible. Edelheit emphasizes that after you figure out the inside tricks to the search engines and cooperative links, you have an unlimited potential to reach people. He believes that one of the keys to a successful website is providing information that your targeted market would find useful — and then providing product offerings as an attractive supplement.
You'll find tips for preparing a plan for a web-based business contributed by Edelheit and the founder of Business Plan Pro at www.gregholden.com/appendix.htm.