Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Free advertising methods, in my opinion, work just as well. There are many methods you can use: organic SEO (that comes from a website that is well-built), article marketing, taking part in forums and contributing your expertise, helping others in Yahoo!Answers. Also, don't forget methods like blogging, Twitter and Facebook. If you look at the webinars in MarketingProfs, you'll get plenty of ideas.

Also you must not forget offline promotion methods too. Are you telling people about your website? Are you promoting your website well in your email signature, in flyers, in brochures? Can you work with a complementary partner offline?

I believe the idea is NOT to generate MORE but to generate QUALITY traffic which will convert once they land at your website. That said, is your website built to convert traffic that comes its way? So all these methods work in tandem with your website.

But there is also nothing wrong with using paid advertising. Also remember that free advertising isn't really free because it does take time and effort and as every business owner knows, time is always a factor when one is running a business. Which do you focus on and which do you let go of?

Thanks.

With paid advertising, you can control the speed that your message travels (i.e., you can get more traffic sooner).

BigMoney,

When you ask about paid versus free internet advertising I assume you're talking about paid search (PPC) versus search engine optimization (SEO), yes?

If that's the case, neither is free. While you don't pay for each click with SEO like PPC, the former requires an upfront cost in content development, site architecture, etc. There's always a cost to advertising even SEO.

Here are some considerations you have to make choosing between PPC and SEO.

Immediacy

SEO takes time, depending on the competition for your terms. Easy terms may take a couple weeks while competitive terms may take 6 months or more. Meanwhile, PPC can start sending traffic to your site immediately.

Control

With PPC you have control over the keywords that send traffic to your site, and which pages on your site that traffic hits. This makes for great testing of ad copy, offers on landing pages. Meanwhile, SEO can be targeted but there's also the possibility it may drive unrelated traffic to the wrong pages on your site.


I think both PPC and SEO are both great sources of traffic. Without knowing more about your business I can't say either is better for your company. In some cases I've seen SEO outperform PPC, and the reversal is also true. I think you should test both and see where the chips fall.

Cheers,

- Jesse