***CAUTION***
When I refer to online advertising and marketing, I am almost exclusively referring to either Google/Bing/Yahoo pay per click advertising and also Organic SEO. Indeed, 99% of all online advertising is probably about as ineffective as traditional advertising.
This might sound like an exaggeration, but ask any experienced business person and they will tell you that with the internet, this is truly the golden age of marketing (that is, if you do not make money by selling advertising). Never before could you get fantastic advertising so cheap. Never before could you limit the amount of money you were willing to spend on advertising. And until now, you really did not have any cost-effective ways of tracking the performance of your advertising dollar.
With traditional advertising such as phone books, magazine ads, TV, Radio, and newspapers if you want advertising you will have to pay a pretty penny. For instance, a one square inch ad in your local phone book could run between $100-$300 PER MONTH! That totals to around $1,000-$4,000 or more per year. And guess what. If you do not make one red penny off those ads, there are no refunds.
Another problem with traditional advertising is that you are quite limited in the way you communicate your information. They will charge you extra for color, special editing, logos, pictures, positioning on certain pages, etc. And let's say that 6 months into your advertising contract you decide to move your shop across the street, you're out of luck. It's not like they can recall those phone books on your count. And if you want to add or delete certain products or services from your ads, a lot of times you're pretty much locked in.
Another problem is that with traditional advertising, especially ones with more than one month contracts as is the case with phone books, you cannot give them a test drive to see how well they will perform. With advertising, unfortunately it is not exactly performance-based pay. There are no sample spoons in their shop. It's take it or leave it.
And of course there are other shady problems to deal with. A lot of times when you purchase advertising with a radio station, the day those ads start playing you will suddenly get a lot of strange and ridiculous phone calls. And these phone calls will invariably be very brief and they will sound like the person on the other line is taking out the trash or something. Then the next day you will notice that there are no more phone calls. And about two weeks later, when your radio advertising contract will expire, you will inexplicably receive a flood of strange phone calls from people asking about your products and services.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a lot of these strange phone calls are actually originating from the radio station, their friends and family. They know that in order for them to charge the high fees they charge they have to give you the impression that their advertising is working like gangbusters. Unfortunately, this happens a lot more than you would think, and the problem is getting worse.
In stark contrast, you can now get fantastic cost-effective advertising that you can:
1.) Track. You can track who comes to your website, from which zip code they live in, how long they were on your website, what operating system they were using, which pages they visited on your website, and other information.
2.) Cut your losses quickly. Face it. I don't care what kind of business you run or how great your advertising is. Some will work like a champ, while others will work like a chump. And most advertising will not work at all. In these cases, you can cut your losses a lot quicker and you can re-distribute those dollars to newer advertising or to the ads that are already winning.
3.) Test. There are many different methods for testing the performance of ads. One method is called "split-testing" which refers to Google AdWords. There are also many other analytics tools available to test and see whether advertising will work or not.
4.) Shift Gears Quickly. Unlike most traditional advertising, you can remain more fluid with online advertising and marketing. You can change the ads to feature new products and services. You can raise or lower price points. You can experiment with new images or different phrases.
5.) Take more chances. Unlike traditional advertising, you might only have one or two bullets in your gun. With online marketing, you will have a machine gun. That's because you will have almost an infinite number of opportunities to test new things and new ideas and see what people really want from your products and services and at what price. With phone books, you send out your torpedos and cross your fingers and hope they hit something.
***CAUTION***
When I refer to online advertising, I am almost exclusively referring to either Google/Bing/Yahoo pay per click advertising and also Organic SEO. Indeed, 99% of all online advertising is probably about as ineffective as traditional advertising.
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