Website visitors are the KEY to success and making money on the Internet
The money making formula is:
Traffic + Conversion = Money
Yes you do need some products or services to sell, or some other benefit from your visitors but without visitors your website will not be of any benefit.
The biggest challenge however is how to economically get visitors.
While there are numerous methods of advertising and marketing, both on and off the Internet including some free advertising options not all are cost effective.
Free advertising does not mean that it is cost effective. The reason that most so called free advertising is not cost effective varies, but in general there is a very very low response rate (often zero) and often a huge amount of competition and a substantial amount of ongoing work is required to use free advertising. The net result is that in general the rewards from most free advertising are not worth the effort and you would make more money flipping hamburgers. This is not to say free advertising should not be considered but you need to establish what is cost effective for your business.
Paid advertising has it's own issues, obviously you need money to pay for advertising but also you need to ensure that you get sufficient benefit (profits) to make it cost effective.
What is cost effective advertising?
For advertising to be cost effective for a product or service, the advertising cost (including your labour costs (time is money)) needs to be a relatively small proportion of your available profit. As profit margins vary for different items; what may be a cost effective marketing option for one product or service may not be cost effective for another.
As profit margins are normally linked to the product or service value; generally the higher the item value the higher the profit and the more advertising can cost and still be cost effective.
Cost effective advertising is the vital KEY to success
Unless you use cost effective advertising you are going to fail.
It is very easy to go broke, unless you are using cost effective advertising.
Advertising & marketing costs overview
We are only able to provide a summary of some key advertising & marketing options here but have some more detailed information in our free course.
While advertising costs vary the average costs from a survey in 2011 were:-
| Type of advertising | Cost per thousand website views |
|---|---|
| CPC (PPC) | $1240 |
| CPM (CPV) adjusted for click through (1) | $1221 |
| Free search engine traffic (2) | $0.00 |
| Self promoting traffic (3) | $0.00 |
| Free advertising (4) | Varies |
| Word of mouth (5) | Varies |
| Networking (6) | 0-$5000 |
| Media (7) | $160-$2000 |
CPC & CPM were provided by www.hochmanconsultants.com
CPC = Cost per click
PPC = Pay per click
CPM = Cost per thousand impressions
CPV = Cost per view
Notes
1) CPM (CPV) adjusted for click through is based on a CPM of $8.55 and a CTR of 0.7% giving a cost per thousand site visitors of $1240.00.
2) The major search engine does not charge for a free listing. There can however be a substantial amount of effort required to make optimise (SEO) a website to get a good search engine ranking.
3) Self promoting traffic is free. After setting up no or very additional little effort is required.
4) So called free advertising is rarely truly free and often requires a substantial amount of ongoing effort for the returns received. If you factor in the cost of your time, so called free advertising is rarely even cost effective.
5) Word of mouth can be effective but often requires a lot of time and effort selling yourself and your business. For small local businesses it can work well.
6) Both online (social) and offline networking can be cost effective but this is not always the case especially with offline networking.
7) Printed, audio and visual media pricing varies dramatically and needs to be considered on a case by case basis.
Advertising cost per item sold
The cost per thousand views (about $1.23 per website visitor) shown above is not whole story. This is just the cost of getting visitors to visit your website. You can expect that only a few percent of your visitors will actually buy, most can be expected to just look. The conversion rate from visitors to buyers does depend on a number of factors including what you are marketing and how good your site is at selling.
The conversion rate (visitors into buyers) is typically about 2%. The following table shows how the cost per sale varies with conversion rates from 2 to 10%. Please note we are working on updating some of the costs shown as a ?
| Type of advertising | Advertising cost per item sold for various conversion rates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2% | 5% | 10% | |
| CPC (PPC) | $60.00 | $24.00 | $12.00 |
| CPM (CPV) adjusted for click through | $61.05 | $24.60 | $12.21 |
| Search engine traffic (free listing) | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Self promoting traffic | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Free advertising | ? | ? | ? |
| Word of mouth | ? | ? | ? |
From the figures above you can see why so many people go broke using paid advertising, especially with lower value products. It is all in the mathematics, sorry but it is true.
So what is the solution?
- Focus your marketing efforts on the most cost effective advertising & marketing options.
- Integrate a number of advertising methods where this can provide a more effective overall solution.
- Keep improving your advertising and marketing.
- Track your advertising & marketing costs.
Using a combination of methods will generally provide better results. If an advertising method is costing money to run and it is not cost effective then stop using it before you go broke.
Search engines (free listings)
This is a must do if you have a website. However there are some things to take into account. Unless you spend the time and effort to do the SEO (Search engine optimization), or get someone else to do it for you, you are unlikly to get much traffic from free search engine listings. In competitive areas you may need to do a lot of work to get good rankings and traffic.
Self promoting traffic
This is a new way to generate a progressively increasing stream of visitors to your website using viral traffic building techniques. A key advantage of this system is not only is it free to use but it will continue to drive traffic to your website over time. This system can be used in conjunction with most other advertising methods to increase the total amount of traffic.
Word of mouth and networking
While word of mouth is worth including in your list of marketing techniques it is more applicable to local than global marketing. Some networking groups are just not cost effective due to the high prices membership and meeting charges and the investment in time is often not worth the effort.
Pay per click and pay per view
With any paid advertising you need to ensure that it is going to be cost effective. As a quick test look at the cost of getting the visitor to your website and the conversion rate from visitors to buyers.
Media advertising
A quick test you can use is to divide the advert cost by the advert views or circulation to compare various options. While the cost per view is a good starting point also consider how well the circulation matches your target audience.
Social and business networking
There are numerous social and business networking sites that are worth registering on. To get the maximum out of these it is normally necessary to spend time and effort to get a reasonable amount of traffic to your website.
Where to start?
The best place to start is to register and set up your website with the self promoting traffic system. Not only is this FREE viral marketing system very cost effective to set up and use, you can also increase your website visitors from other forms of advertising / marketing when used in conjunction with the self promoting traffic system. We also have a free step by step course of advertising and marketing tips to help users of the self promoting traffic system. Click here or on the button below to set up your website.
Meeting your requirements
While we hope that the information we have provided above has been of help to you, we appreciate that everyone's requirements are different and invite you to contact us about your specific needs, or call on 01494 721739 for more information.