How to Build a Powerful Marketing Campaign!

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How to Build a Powerful Marketing Campaign!

by Mark Daoust

If you have a website, chances are you have fallen victim to burst marketing
(and thus wasted valuable money).

The natural inclination for most website owners is to advertise only in the most recognized places, such as highly visible websites, recognized industry leaders, expensive pay per click search engines, or other expensive off-line venues. Spending a large amount of money in a very concentrated form, they hope to realize a return with the only a few untested advertisements. This is burst marketing, the practice of website owners to market their websites in short, expensive, and usually ineffective bursts.

Although burst marketing will probably produce some results, it does not allow website owners to properly build a good marketing campaign. A good marketing campaign is built over time, marked with consistency, steadiness, and friendly to a company's cash flow. A good marketing campaign should grow with the business, in size, expenditure, reach, and net results. In the early stages of building a marketing campaign, website owners should look for low-cost, high-return venues that can remain constant from month to month. As the website grows, the marketing campaign can build off this foundation of low-cost, high-impact, consistent marketing by adding advertisements to web sites that have a high visibility (and more expensive ads), but not necessarily an immediate positive return. What is important is that a consistent foundation be built BEFORE purchasing a more expensive short-lived, untested advertising spot.

When building your marketing campaign, begin by developing a list of potential advertising venues. Include everything from well recognized sites to lesser known but still relevant websites to your industry. The goal is to spread your monthly advertising budget across several websites instead of one or two web sites where the results are unproven for your website. By advertising across several different websites, you will find a few sites that produce much greater returns than their initial costs. These sites should be become the cornerstones of your marketing campaign. Of course, there will be other web sites that do not produce results for you. These sites should be discontinued from your monthly advertising.

The cornerstone sites of your marketing campaign must remain consistent. Their consistency will add to their long term effectiveness. No matter what new advertising opportunities arise, do not let anything jeopardize these cornerstone ads. The consistent success of these ads will allow you to grow your marketing campaign further, even including advertising that previously would have caused your campaign to sputter and trap you in the bad habit of burst marketing.

Search engine marketing is often the best place to begin building a marketing campaign. Because search engines send keyword driven traffic to your website, they tend to provide some of the greatest results available. In addition, it is possible to run a very low cost search engine marketing campaign. As you build your marketing campaign, you will want to start with only the search engines that provide the greatest return on your initial investment.

Pay per click search engines (PPC Search Engines) are a great source of quality traffic. Popular PPC search engines are Overture (http://www.overture.com), Google Ad Words (http://www.google.com/ads/), and Kanoodle (http://www.kanoodle.com). Due to the competitive nature of bidding on keywords, pay per click search engines can be quite expensive. For this reason, we encourage website owners to first look to pay per click alternatives.

PPC alternatives are search engines that offer advertiser services similar to traditional PPC's, but do not come with the high PPC cost. The most recognizable PPC alternative is TowerSearch (http://www.towersearch.com/add/add.htm). TowerSearch invites advertisers to list their site under the keywords they choose while guaranteeing that their listings will show at the top of their results. Instead of charging their clients on a per click basis, however, TowerSearch charges a low flat monthly fee, regardless of how many targeted clicks are delivered. TowerSearch is a great resource to start a marketing campaign as the cost of running a campaign is consistent month to month, the results are highly targeted, and will ultimately grow with your website. Another quality PPC alternative is ExactSeek Priority Listings (http://exactseek.com/add_priority.html). As a free alternative to pay per click search engines, ExacktSeek increases a websites ranking in their search engine based on the amount of traffic sent to them. With priority listings, the more traffic you send, the more "credits" you receive from ExactSeek, and the better positioning you have in their search engine.

In addition to adding your site to these PPC alternatives, it is highly recommended that you setup an affiliate program. Affiliate programs assure you of making a return on your investment every time you achieve a sale. There are several options to setup an affiliate program. You can work with a third party such as Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com) or ClickXchange (http://www.clickxchange.com). These companies handle paying your affiliates, as well as bringing new affiliates to your program.

As a less expensive alternative to either of these affiliate program managers, you can choose to run your affiliate program in house. This can become difficult to manage, however. In addition, finding the right program to manage your affiliate program, installing it, and maintaining it can be quite time consuming.

Building a quality marketing campaign takes time, patience, and most importantly, consistency in your presence. Begin building your campaign using PPC alternatives such as TowerSearch and ExactSeek. Make sure you add a quality affiliate program and look for websites within your industry to develop a long-term, consistent presence.

About the Author
Article by Mark Daoust, owner of CPC-List.com.
CPC-List is a comprehensive resource of pay per click search engines and search engine related marketing information. Learn more by visiting http://www.cpc-list.com