| Special
to the Oakland Business Review:
OAKLAND, Calif. –
How can a small business like yours, with a Web site that may count
its visitors by the thousands, hope to compete with Web behemoths
that have huge armies of programmers, content generators and Web
strategists attracting visitors – and customers – by
the millions?
You can do it, by knowing who your customers
and prospective customers are and specifically what they want, and
by helping them find you with advertising at costs that are literally
measured in pennies.
Competing with the big guys is getting easier
every day. Search engine marketing is a cheap yet powerful way to
help new customers find you. The cost of starting a program can
be as low as $100 a month, and there’s no long-term contract.
You really don’t need high-cost design. You don’t need
high-priced expert help. You just need to know your business.
The best thing about search engine marketing
is that it taps your prospective customers’ desire to find
you. It’s a classified advertising concept, like newspaper
want ads or telephone book listings, but with the power of the Internet.
The user first decides he wants a particular product or service,
and when he or she goes looking for it, they find you.
Web users turn to search engines and directories
like Google or Yahoo or AOL some 400 million times every day to
find everything from books to vacation properties, telephones to
rare oriental carpets. Search-engine marketing means getting your
business to come up on the page that searcher will find - if you
have exactly what they want. And those are the customers you want.
In some cases it means paying to be included
high in a search engine’s list. Most commonly today, it means
a text or graphic advertisement at the top of that same page, which
you pay for at auction rates ranging from 2 cents to $2 each time
a potential customer actually clicks on your listing to visit your
Web site. No clicks, no charge. No other advertising works like
that.
Another form of search-engine marketing has no advertising rates
at all, focusing instead solely on optimizing your Web site so it
will show up high in appropriate listings with no help from ads.
At e-agency, we recommend a combination of
all three.
Each of the search engine services that offer
pay-for-position advertising does so on their public Web site. You
write your ad – usually about 10 to 15 words, pick a few keyword
phrases that you think customers might use when they’re searching
for you – be as specific as you think they will be - and submit
the ad to the search engine to find out what the going rate is for
that phrase. The price depends on who else wants to use it. Then
you set how much you’re willing to pay per click, as well
your own maximum monthly budget and submit it – and you’re
in business.
Of course, an agency like ours can help
you optimize your ads and key words, monitor their performance and
stay on top of new offerings in the quickly changing search-engine
marketplace. We definitely bring value to our clients who seek our
help with search engines. But, in fact, you can do it yourself.
MyIPTelephone.com, an online telephone accessory
store, started spending $1,000 a month on key-word advertising last
fall and more than covered the cost of the program with new sales.
Now their ads are performing well and they’ve cut their budget
back while achieving the same results. Another client, advertising
a vacation home in Mexico, receives three calls a week from a $10-a-day
advertising budget. Clay Parsons, a Berkeley-based career counselor,
signs up one new client a week from ads that cost about less than
$2 each, taking searchers to his site, www.alternativefutures.com.
This is truly the power of the Internet placing
you, the small business operator, in charge.
_______________________________
E-agency is an Oakland-based interactive
marketing communications firm specializing in advertising, public
relations, strategic marketing consulting, response marketing, graphic
design, and a complete range of more than 40 Internet services,
including Web site design, e-mail marketing, Web advertising and
site marketing. A few clients include Oakland International Airport,
Safeway, the Shorenstein Company, KaiserAir and the Oakland Metropolitan
Chamber of Commerce.
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