A discussion about the process, steps and options of starting a new business

There was a post on Retailwire today regarding the bombardment of advertising that consumers are subjected to every day.  Ben Ball, SVP, Dechert-Hampe included the following as part of his comment on the article:

"It is cheaper and easier to buy thousands of "impressions" especially online, than it is to do the targeting work that enables delivery to a more select -- and interested -- audience."

Now isn't that the truth!  By putting advertisements anywhere you can, just because you can, you not only do a disservice to the consumer, but also to your own business.  By targeting everyone, you are actually targeting nobody at all.

Taking the time to do a little bit of research about your target audience will give you a bigger return on your advertising dollar every single time.  And it doesn't always mean spending more money.  In fact, when advertising on the internet, there is even a way that you can spend less money, and obtain a better click-to-conversion rate!

If you are new to such programs as AdSense, YAHOO! Search Marketing, etc., a simple (very simple) explanation of how they work is that you choose a word or phrase relevant to your product or service.  When people search the internet using these "keywords", or look at an internet page related to the keyword, your ad is shown to them.  You pay a certain amount of money, determined by the popularity of the word, each time someone clicks on your ad and is directed to your website.

If you aren't careful in choosing your keywords, you can pay for a million clicks and never convert one single click into a customer.  Money down the drain.  So, what was that I said about paying less money?

There is a little theory called Long Tail.  I won't get into all the specifics because I could write a book, and in fact, someone has.  But, in relation to pay-per-click, it means that if you graphed all the words used to search for your product, the graph would look something like this:

The key to spending less advertising dollars is to choose keywords that nobody else wants, but which are still relevant to your business.  The ones that would show up in what appears to be a long tail on the right side of our graph.  The reason is because the price of a keyword is set by demand.  The more people who want to use that word to show their ad at the top of a webpage, the more it will cost you to obtain that top spot.

For example, I sell Mexican handcrafts.  Now, if I want to show my ad to everybody searching for "handcrafts" it will cost me (as of this writing) 37 cents every time a person clicks on it.  If I only want to show it to people searching for "Mexican handcrafts", the price goes down to 15 cents.  But if I want to display my ad to people searching for "Mexican wooden dragon", it drops to only 10 cents, less than one third of the original keyword price.

And who do you think is more likely to actually buy that Mexican wooden dragon when they get to my website?  The person looking for handcrafts or the person looking for a Mexican wooden dragon?

So, choose carefully and choose wisely, always keeping your keywords relevant, and you can convert more browsers into buyers, while spending less money at the same time.