Advertising and Marketing blog

When you were just a young and precocious student of marketing, someone explained to you how to market to humans. “Know your target audience!” said the experts. “AIDA method!” they pressed on.

“Attention. Interest. Desire. Action.” You know this old drill. “Make it happen in the minds of your hungry buying prospects!”

Then you went to the web. Ah, web marketing… a horse of a different color. Now it’s all about the Engines. What do the search engines want? What are those crawlers looking for?

So you switched gears, forgot about your old friend Aida, and started shelling out bucks for SEO experts to tweak your website. You signed another fat check over for a long list of email addresses. You paid for expensive programs so that you could slut your company name and logo around the net! You even dished some dollars for that danged popup campaign… something you swore you’d never do…

All of this SEO stuff can’t be a bad thing. But did you forget about your target customer? He’s still a HUMAN. So as much as you want to leverage your search engine strategy for the most exposure, don’t forget to send some marketing love to the human beings who are seeing your ads all over the place.

Have you heard about the latest marketer’s ace in the hole, the web article? If not, it’s time to get in the know. The web articles is the IDEAL way to get your message to the brains of human beings. How’s it work?

There are websites out there that want you to submit articles to them, so that they can distribute them to other websites. Every web article you write will have your URL attached.

Therefore, the web article is the perfect way to improve your search engine rank while simultaneously building a strong case for your product with your key customer.

Web articles do a fine job of marketing to both humans and search engines. Web articles afford amazing backlinking potential for your website, plus a targeted message for your key prospects… and the best part is, they don’t cost a dime to write or distribute.

If you submit articles to a site like EzineArticles.com, you can potentially have your articles picked up by thousands of websites. And that’s an awful lot of free links back to you! While your links are working to your benefit, those folks on the web are soaking up what you have to say and deciding that you are A-OK. Then, they’re clicking your link. What other linking opportunity has ever afforded you such a golden chance to build your brand and speak to your customer face to face? None!

Let me put it to you this way. If you suddenly cut off all of your web marketing tricks, like those banner ads, popups and linking strategies, the “engines” would move on to whoever else was dinging those keywords, and quickly forget all about you.

But if you manage to reach a HUMAN BEING, and impress an idea into their head with an article while delivering information they can use… you will have a fan for life.

Remember the AIDA method from your early advertising days? It’s still alive and well and can be applied to your Article Marketing Power Campaign to leverage the strength of your brand.

Start marketing to Search Engines and humans. Develop your Article Marketing campaign today!

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Liked this article? Have more of the same emailed to your inbox each month. Sign up for the Copywriting and Marketing Ezine from Dina at Wordfeeder.com and learn to write search engine friendly web copy and market your web based business for free.

In order to generate online sales, your business must increase Web traffic and – more importantly – drive targeted visitors to your site. A highly successful method of doing so is targeted pop advertising, also referred to as targeted pop under ads.

With the right Internet marketing and advertising company as your partner, targeted pop advertising is a very cost effective method that allows you to increase Web traffic and send targeted visitors to your website. In essence, this form of marketing allows thousands of people to actually see and visit your website at the same time they are looking for your type of products and services. This is because the visitors have been targeted according to the topic or topics that you select. For example, if you are promoting a home business opportunity, Internet users looking for home business opportunities will see your pop under ads. Likewise, if you have a shopping site, or are promoting medical or legal services, visitors who are specifically interested in those areas will be exposed to your pop under ad.

In order to get the most bang from your marketing buck, choose an Internet marketing and advertising company that:

1. Has established affiliate relationships with popular high-traffic websites. The owners of these sites will have coded their Web pages so that a full-page pop under ad window will open when someone visits their site. This relationship will ensure that your website is displayed to thousands of potential customers or clients.

2. Has time delay technology that ensure that you will not be charged for your pop under ad until it has been on display for at least 20 seconds. Some disreputable companies will count ads that have already been closed by the user before being fully loaded or read, thereby decreasing your return on investment.

3. Has technology that overrides or gets around pop up ad blockers.

4. Offers advertising packages that only count unique visitors in a 24-hour period toward your allotted pop under ad block.

5. Carefully places pop under advertising so as not to overload website and annoy visitors; rather the pop under ads will have maximum appeal.

6. Offers a good value, by guaranteeing a certain number of pop under ads for a low price. You should look for a company that offers pop under ads for less than two cents apiece.

7. Provides you with a unique Web address to view the actual Web visitors who respond to your pop under ads and track your progress.

Research has demonstrated that pop under ads are often more effective than email campaigns. This targeted pop advertising approach works because only those visitors who are interested in your particular category are exposed to your pop under ads.

Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web.
Learn more about Targeted Pop Advertising or Majon’s Computer Software directory

1. Determine the goals of your promotional products program. Do you want to create awareness? To attract new customers? To reward or provide incentives to existing customers? Remember to determine a means for measuring the results.

2. Plan ahead. At minimum, you’ll need two to four weeks for
production and delivery of standard products. If you wait until the last minute, your choices will be limited and you may pay more. When creating custom items, it can take 12 weeks or more shipping from overseas sources.

3. Involve your target audience. Be creative in how you distribute your promotional products and make it a memorable experience for the recipient. Also create an “out of box” experience whenever possible by creatively packaging your gifts and awards.

4. Choose promotional products that have “legs.” Put your logo on
products that your target customer will see often. For instance,
products that are kept on the desk, in the car, or on the refrigerator can create dozens of impressions per day.

5. Get free ideas. Don’t always ask your promotional products
specialist for the standards such as mugs and pens. Instead, tell your promotional products specialist your budget and target audience, and let them make creative recommendations from their database of over half a million products.

Dan Safkow is a 20-year veteran of promotional marketing and the owner of Promo Ideation http://www.promoideation.com, a promotion products distributorship and marketing consultancy.