Marketing Your Website

A quick search on google for "website marketing" yielded a who's who of scammers and carnival style pitch men looking to sell services to make you money.

I am not going to say every marketing opportunity is a scam, but these types of businesses from selling web traffic to banners on low traffic websites tend to prey on peoples desires to make money.

Just because someone is charging for a service does not mean it is worth the price. Don't get caught up in the hype and think if you spend money you will make money. In some cases you can but in most you wont.

The market is rich with wannabe millionaires and many offer services that they don't know much about or have very little experience providing services. Some people just start a business because they heard it is a profitable venture and they will tell you anything to get your money.

They will tell you "there is gold in those hills". They will tell you that they can get you massive volumes of search engine traffic for free, jut pay them $1000 to make it happen. Don't!

Rather than paying someone money to possibly get you search engine traffic, go directly to the search engine and and use your money for advertising and buy your own traffic. You can buy clicks for as low as a penny a click although most quality traffic will be ten cents to ten dollars a click.

There is no magic that can transform your website into a search engine traffic funnel. Nobody can promise you that and if they do they are clearly scamming you. The only people that can promise you search engine placement are the search engines and they wont.

Even the google help pages mention ads they get addressed to Mr Google and how they can get google.com placed at the top of the search engines. It is kind of hilarious but at the same time it is a serious problem for the average person.

Google surely knows better, but how do you know what works, what is a scam and what is just plain a bad deal.

Unfortunately we can't write all that in a basic article, it would take several chapters of a hard bound book to even touch the surface of this issue. But we do want to outline some good guidelines.

1. If the advertising makes you more than you spend, its a no brainer. But you wont know until it is too late. So ask the advertiser for guarantees. If you buy banner space, pay only based on traffic or sales or require that the ad meets some performance benchmark before they get paid.

2. If you are buying banner impressions, you need to verify traffic by having the banner pull from your website so you can track how many times the banner is viewed and which pages are displaying it.

3. Verify ads and locations. If you sell Christian supplies you wont what your ads to appear on hardcore sex sites or sites that offer downloads of stolen software. It is important that your market is clear and trackable and it does not use redirected traffic from high volume porn websites to display your ads.

For example, one customer was selling Christian Books. We tracked an ad to a hardcore porn website with the words "Click Here For #$%& Teen Virgins". I will leave the actual wording to your imagination.

Clearly the visitor is not looking to cuddle up with the Bible and will just click back wasting your time and costing you cash for the click.

It can also associate your website with a bad element and hurt your business in the long run.

4. Programs like google ad words are safe, but you need to set a reasonable value for the clicks. They can charge as much as $50 a click and it just does not make sense to pay that type of price for products that are just a few dollars. Make sure the cost is proportionate with the earning. You can loose just as much money with legit programs if you do not know what you are doing.

5. Which brings us to the key point. Do the research! Check out the vendor, make sure they have a proven track record. If they seem too good to be true, they probably are.

If you have a website you will need to market it. But there are scammers out there that know you have no clue and will bite at any bait. You best defense against being scammed is to learn more about what you are doing and not blindly assume that you are getting a great deal.