PART II: Public Relations

Many companies underestimate the power of Public Relations or have a misconception about how it works and how much it costs to hire a Public Relations specialist. A job search web site such as Guru.com will get you a Public Relations expert to work for you for around $500 a month. If you're on a tight budget or don't feel comfortable spending $500 on a Public Relations specialist, a highly recommended book to get is "Full Frontal PR: Getting People Talking about You, Your Business, or Your Product" by Richard Laermer & Michael Prichinello – the book explains how to do it yourself.

One of the more noticed and a popular technique in the Public Relations arsenal is the Press Release. In order for a Press Release to be successful, you need to sit down and think of a newsworthy story. The important thing to constantly ask yourself is would anyone else be interested in this story besides yourself? A highly recommended book on press releases you should invest in is Writing Effective News Releases by Catherine V. McIntyre.

Partnerships

The thing about partnerships is that you need to keep in mind both parties have a similar goal - gain new clients. When you decide who to work with, choose carefully. Partnership possibilities abound with web site monitoring services, bulk traffic services, promotion companies and anything related to web hosting and design. It's better to choose a company who has the same range as yours since it will be easier and more effective to promote each other's services.

Affiliate Program

Contrary to what you might believe, it isn't enough to simply set up an affiliate script, post a link to it on your site, and wait for the referrals. Affiliate marketing is an incredibly powerful tool, but takes a lot of patience and work to take off the ground and is often a full time job on its own. In fact, affiliate marketing is a form of partnership and so it’s important to think of your affiliates as your business partners. Many companies we know have a dedicated affiliate manager that constantly keep up with the affiliates sending out promotional materials, press releases about the company, monthly incentives and so on to keep affiliates motivated.

Just like any partnership, if you help your partners by constantly motivating them and provide them with all of the resources and tools they might possibly need (including small details like signature text to use in eMails), they will return the favor by consistently bringing new referrals to you. An important thing to remember is that not all affiliates are created equal. Some are better than others and you should offer extra attention and care to these affiliates who actually deliver instead of spreading your time across all of them. For a good, free publication on affiliate marketing, try Revenue Today (http://www.mthink.com/) - they cover affiliate strategies, techniques and more.

Postcards

This technique usually works better for companies that already have an established client base. You might consider it for yourself in the future or you could purchase a targeted mailing list. USPS.com offers a service to print and mail full-color postcards with custom text and even a logo for just $.79 a piece. Imagine what kind of an effect it would have on your clients if you sent them the postcards thanking them for their businesses and asking them for referrals or direct them to an affiliate program. For new customers on a mailing list, choose your target carefully and suggest your company as the solution to the list of common web problems of that niche if there are.

In this day and age, a postcard from a hosting company would be considered unusual but certainly a nice touch. It could demonstrate the professionalism of your company and that you really care about your clients to the point you are willing to go above and beyond to make sure they are happy.

PART III: Branding

Branding isn’t truly a marketing technique but a most coveted result of advertising and marketing efforts especially done right. Yet, many companies tend to ignore or dilute their brands for the sake of making quick sales. Brands are what make a product memorable. They create differentiation and encourage loyalty among users. Look at Mac. It’s not just a computer; it’s a brand with its own personality, character and of course loyal users.

One of the most common mistakes businesses make is offering a plethora of services. While it’s understandable that you want to be able to provide your clients with everything they might need, at the same time, this strategy dilutes the image of your company. If you want people to associate your brand with high quality hosting services, you should concentrate on promoting that, rather than try to be all things to all people.

A brand should stand for something and needs to remain consistent in order to yield results over long-term. Furthermore, it’s important to avoid using a generic name when deciding on the brand. “GreatHosting.com” may appear to be a quality domain name and might even result in increased search engine rankings but in reality, people have a hard time remembering something like that. Look at Google, Yahoo! and eBay. Coined names that on its own or before they existed meant nothing yet just the name is worth a lot of money to these companies. They would not be the same if they discarded their names today. If you want to learn more about building a brand and avoiding the common mistakes, get the book “The 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding” by Al Ries and Laura Ries.

PART IV: Making Sense of It All - Tracking

Now you have some ideas, gathered a few techniques you want to give a
shot. Don’t forget to track your results! As advertising legend, David Ogilvy, once said, “I know half of my advertising works. I just don’t know which half.” While this could be a problem for mass media advertising, such as TV or radio where it’s often difficult to accurately obtain returns to the penny, there is no excuse for not tracking your online advertising. Technology has made tracking ads online so advanced; you can monitor the behavior of your visitors and even show purchasing patterns.

As a business owner, it’s important to understand that advertising is never guaranteed. What works well for one company, may not be as effective for another. Furthermore, the success of each campaign depends on a number of factors, such as the way the ad copy is written, the landing page where your prospects go, your web site layout; and so on. All of these aspects must be in sync in order for the ad to bring solid results. Fortunately, using ad tracking software such as http://www.lyris.com, AtlasOnePoint.com (formerly GoToast), you can now experiment various advertising outlets, ad copy or ad type and discover what works for your business almost instantly.

Tracking your promotional efforts is a must or you’ll end up spending money needlessly, or never fully harness the potential of a channel or method! Imagine if a change in just one word of your ad copy could increase your conversion by even a small percentage. Wouldn’t it be a shame not to know that? You would go on getting customers at $1 per customer when you could gain them at only $0.80. That’s 20% in profit you’ve thrown away.

So now, are you ready to really start marketing your business?

What’s The Deal With “Other” PPC Search Engines?

As far as most advertisers are concerned, there are really only two pay per click search engines that deserve their attention - Google's AdWords and Overture (owned by Yahoo!). After all, these are the most popular search engines that dominate the industry in terms of traffic, technology, and popularity.

This also means that the competition for a position on these search engines is fierce, which causes bid prices for many keywords to go up, making it too costly for smaller players to get into the game.

Fortunately, another category of PPC search engines, known as 2nd Tier, exists. Don't let the name fool you - many of these search engines process in excess of billions of searches per month and some are actual public companies or wholly owned subsidiaries thereof, such as FindWhat, ePilot, Marchex (owner of GoClick), and several others.

2nd Tier also includes search engines such as SearchFeed, Enhance, Kanoodle, 7Search, PageSeeker, Search123, and so on. While all of them combined represent less user traffic that Google AdWords alone, you will find that you can actually get very decent positions on a lot of them without spending an arm and a leg.

In general, you will find that if it takes you 20 clicks to get 1 sale on Google, it may take you 200 visitors to get 1 sale on a minor search engine. However, since it all comes down to ROI, you might wind up paying the same or even less per sale, as the bids are significantly lower on the 2nd Tier engine where it took 200 clicks to make 1 sale.

There is a lot of controversy going on regarding the actual conversions that 2nd tier search engines bring. A popular rumor is that they work with lower-quality traffic providers. In reality, however, minor search engines actually do work with some pretty great content web sites It just varies from industry to industry. You may find that an advertiser selling web hosting may have miserable results on a specific search engine, while another advertiser selling flowers may get an excellent return on investment.

Of course, it also has a lot to do with your skills as an ad writer. After all, a skillfully crafted title and description can make all the difference between a successful campaign and a dismal failure.

My personal recommendation would be to definitely try as many other search engine ads as you can afford to. With a minimum commitment of just $25-$50 per search engine, you might just find a new, highly cost effective source of traffic that you'd never known about if you haven't tried this out. Secondly, make sure to utilize the Customer Service these search engines offer. Many of them will assign a specific Account Manager to help you get the most out of the campaign. Talk to them and find out what works and what doesn't, instead of guessing yourself.