Online Marketing Tips

The two most well known doorways into internet marketing involve PPC – Pay Per Click, or Organic SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

Internet marketing simply boils down to getting traffic. After all, if nobody sees your site, you are invisible, and in effect, all your hard work and efforts are neutralized.

Do Your Research and Have an Online Marketing Plan Put Together

If you are a Newb, be very careful with doing PPC – no matter how hard the Guru’s try and sell you how much money they make with it. If you don’t pay close attention and have a handle on it, its no different than gambling.

We all hear stories of people winning in Vegas big time, but there has never been a casino that has gone out of business because of their customers striking gold. You know the saying “What happens in Vegas …”, well that goes for the vast majority of peoples money too.

Ideally, you would use both methods to maximize your internet marketing efforts. But since my blog is geared for beginners lets take a look at the pros and cons of each method.

Organic Search Engine Optimization Vs Pay Per Click

The All Important Click

Most internet research studies show that people doing their searches are 70% more likely to click on the organic search engine listings than on the PPC advertisers. In fact, almost 80% of people have stated they only found the information they were searching for around 40% of the time when clicking on PPC advertisers. And that leads to the issue of…

Trust

The search engines are being programmed smarter and smarter all the time. This means if you are mainly doing organic SEO, your website and keywords have to come through. When people put in their search criteria they are often looking for specific information and your site has to deliver or your rankings will suffer. Like, you won’t get any.

In using PPC, you have a little more leeway, because, after all you are paying for it. But the trends say that potential customers are trusting the organic searches more and more. One study shows that over 60% of customers distrust paid ads and almost 80% claim that they only found what they were looking for through sponsored ads around 40% of the time.

Because of the efficiency of the search engines, people are simply trusting the organic search results more and more. If you are an internet marketer mainly relying on Organic SEO, this make your potential for converting sales much greater.

Now lets not pretend that advertising doesn’t work. In fact, it is a great method for getting immediate traffic to your website. But just like organic SEO, you had better deliver. Customers are becoming savvier and savvier.

So many marketers are saturating the market using the same ol’ tricks and psychologies, that many people see through it all very quickly. So when using PPC, you had better have all of your ducks in place, so to speak, or you will be leaving the promised land discouraged and empty handed.

The Costs

Stated simply, much of the valuable – money making – areas of the web are completely saturated with people who have been doing this for years. It can be done, but it is extremely hard for a newcomer to rank organically on the first page for a profitable search term.

But the way to get there immediately is through PPC. But hang on to your wallet, because you are not competing with the nicest people in the world. If you threaten their turf, they have ways to put your PPC budget through the roof. What will happen is that you can end up overpaying for a keyword that may not convert as well as you can afford, and you will be financially driven out of the market.

I’m not trying to scare you, just be willing to start out a little further in the pastures where you will attract less attention from the sharks. In this way you can work on your organic rankings while learning the PPC ropes.

Time Frame

Using PPC can put you on the first page of a search immediately, while getting a high organic ranking can take months. It is true that for some long tailed keywords you can be on the first page within days, and if you are just starting out that is what I would encourage your online strategy to be.

The reality is, that if your budget runs out for your PPC campaign, Google shows absolutely you no love, no matter how much money you have spent, and your website is retired to the back pages.

Whereas by working on organic SEO you can have a website that keeps growing higher in the search engine rankings over time. So again, if you are doing PPC, the smarter internet marketeers are also working on their SEO at the same time.

So what is the decision?

Putting together an Organic SEO website that has high rankings, is one method that takes a bit longer, but can have very long lasting and profitable results. I’m assuming that you are doing this yourself or in-house.

If you are paying an outside company to do SEO on your site, you may seriously want to consider PPC, simply because you will never find a good company to work for only a few hundred dollars a month and plus, they will need to have a contract and or, they will want a slice of the pie. A good organic SEO ranking just doesn’t happen overnight.

If you want results fast. Put together a well planned out PPC campaign that you can afford. With PPC you don’t need any contracts, you can stop your campaign immediately and take some time to analyze the results. But you still need to work on your SEO or you will feel the pain when your budget runs out. Of course, if you are converting those clicks, all is good

In short, both methods are very useful and in order to be successful, you really need to learn the ins and outs of both techniques. There is no overnight road to financial success in internet marketing. Those who finally make it are not afraid of falling down, they take it all as a learning experience. So remain positive and keep moving.

Be Fearless

Billy Ojai

{ 0 comments }