Internet marketing

Having a website is one thing, but gaining traffic is quite another. Non-internet marketing aside, there are two main ways to get the general populous to look at your website.

Paid advertising

Whilst there are conventional forms of printed, radio and television advertising, which can all bring additional traffic to your website, a more affordable and common way to increase traffic is to advertise on other websites.

Paid advertising on other websites is common, both for websites that cannot naturally rank on search engines, and for those that do.

Advertising generally works best when positioned in locations that are most accessible to a target market; consequently online advertising is often focused at demographically relevant websites, or content-specific websites.

For example if you offer a plumbing service  that operates within a 50 mile radius of your base, your advertising should focus towards websites that attract people over  the age of 16 in that area. Equally you could focus on websites or web page content specifically related to plumbing.

Here are a few example of paid advertising:

• Affiliate marketing

Generating revenue from a website that serves no other function that's being a free community resource can be difficult. As a consequence many website operators look to gain an income through advertising. If the website is successful then the volume of traffic offers the website operator a potential revenue stream through advertising.

Affiliate marketing is where a website operator displays advertising on their website and is paid for every sales conversion that derives from that advert. In many cases the advertiser will approve the website before authorising it to advertise their product or service.

There are a host of companies offering affiliate marketing, and whilst the returns can be good, the commission is paid on conversions and not simply on the number of people that click through.

• Pay per impression

Some high traffic websites offer a pay per impression service, where an advertiser pays for the number of times an advert is shown on the website regardless of the number of clicks. Whilst less common, this type of advertising suits organisations that want to create brand awareness rather than specifically draw visitors to their website. An example would be a company that doesn't sell direct to the public but has a brand that is available to the public through its distributors.

• Pay per click

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is often regarded as the most common form of advertising; every time a PPC advert is clicked on it is charged out to the advertiser. PPC advertising is so common and diverse that there is a whole mistore web page dedicated to the subject. If you would like to read more about pay per click then please click [here.]

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about optimising a website to achieve better positioning in the search engines or commonly referred to as search engine ranking positions (SERPs). Conventionally, this should mean improving the content and structure of your website. However, websites are not only optimised through internal improvements, but also by manipulating the external factors.

Search engines evaluate the relevance of a website by defining a set of complex algorithms, which look at both the internal and external factors surrounding each website. By recreating some the of the external factors it is possible to manipulate the algorithms to value your website above its true ranking. This process is known as black hat SEO. To read more about search engine optimisation click [here], or to read our top tips for SEO click [here].