STARTING WITH ADVERTISING ON YOUR WEBSITE OR WEBSTORE
I am still learning this advertising area. I am less than one year into this, and after all the scams out there to get this going, I decided to do it my myself - live and learn method. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good articles there to read. But also a lot of them redirect you to the blogger website to sell you something else to help you get going.
In 2010, Internet retail sales were over $400 Billion in revenue. I have tracked a few of the more recent sites I like, but as they get bigger, they seem to grow a lot on their pricing. Buying on the Internet will become the way of the future. The way to effectively promote your products through advertising is the question.
Why is buying on the Internet the future. Well, look it objectively. Lets say I need a new computer printer. Several retailers carry them locally. Well, generally, the Internet sales price is at or below the retailer. So I order and pay shipping. Well, if I get into my car, go to the retailer, buy the time I pay sales tax, I have paid more for the product, than on the Internet. You have to factor in product price, sales tax, GAS prices, and time.
So I have learned a lot on the Google AdWords advertising which I have set a daily budget and spend out of my pocket (this article is not an ad for Google). I like the product, it reaches a vast audience, and it is pay as you go. The best thing is Google gives you free live support phone help on your ads, and the average wait time is 2-5 minutes tops.
The biggest issue I can tell a beginner on AdWords is you have the option to set automatic bidding for your ad placement, or manual bidding. On manual bidding, your control panel will tell you what the average bid is too get your ad on the first page of the results of a search.
On automatic bidding, Google will take the dollar amount of maximum per ad budget you set, and find somewhere to place the ad, and you will get clicks. So this is by far cheaper, and works.
For instance, lets say I am selling an HDTV. I set the ad on manual bidding and I look at the Google control panel to see what the first page bid is and it is $1.25 to get your ad on the first page of the search results. That is expensive to get a click and maybe not a sell.
If I set it to automatic bidding, say with a cap of $0.30 per ad, then at some point the ad will appear elsewhere, or at a different time. If I get a click, it is $0.30 instead of $1.25. If you are selling 1 product, the manual bidding maybe better, or in my case, I am selling multiple products, so automatic is better for me, because I am trying to drive traffic to the entire web store to look around.
So, onward we go. If you have a few minutes, please go to my webstore and give me some honest input on the good, bad, ugly, and what I should change. Thanks, John
http://johnsgeneralstoreonline.com
