Effective Contextual Advertising Methods

Refining your AdSense advertising program to cater to the needs of the most Web traffic is both an art and a science. The growth of social networking and blogging networks is encouraging people to click on advertising that is specific to their needs and behavior, and can benefit them in the long run. Contextual advertising is a fairly new advertising module that lets you launch effective ad campaigns by mining and scanning your user’s behavior. For example, when a user is consistently showing interest in a particular link, Web page, or subject, contextual ads can pop up that relate to that behavior specifically.

Contextual advertising has been introduced on the major search engines, including MSN, Yahoo!, and Google. Google’s Gmail currently uses the concept as a “banner” on the top of the user’s Gmail account. The system looks at the most frequent keywords within an e-mail and elicits ads accordingly! Contextual advertising helps advertisers target their advertising directly to people who are more likely to click on them! This gives you, the AdSense advertiser, a higher return on investment (ROI) and better prospects for your advertising campaign in the long term.

Click-through rates and pay-per-clicks (PPC) are the key reinforcers of contextual advertising, and it is through these that you can gauge how well your site and set of ads are doing. The only way you can accurately determine what to use is by trying! Since contextual advertising programs are fairly new to the Web, there is some room for trial and error. However, because your ROI is much higher than with regular click-through and basic AdSense programs, you will likely see more effectiveness with this strategy.

Google is currently leading the way with contextual advertising techniques, tips, and tricks to increase value and search engine optimization overall. Google’s fantastic search engines are market leaders in data mining and extraction, and the process is only improving each day! Microsoft is attempting its version of click-through and pay-per-click advertising with ContentAds. ContentAds allow publishers to use the MSN portal and data to create unique demographic-specific advertising with text-based advertisements. There are also extensive tools and resources available for ContentAd users.

Ad placement, combined with the best type of ad for a given subject, are your key resources for an effective AdSense program. Making use of contextual advertising methods and programs is a smart choice as more Web users begin to ignore traditional advertising methods. Contextual advertising lets you target Web traffic specifically to the user’s interests and past behavior; catering your AdSense program toward a contextual advertising is a smart and cost-effective strategy in the long term!

Seth Willis Jr. is the webmaster for http://www.adsenseschool.com he is an experienced internet marketer and has a lot of expertise with adsense." I created adsense school so that I could help others who are starting out and needed a resource and tutorial site to get started, the school is completely free and there for anyone with a desire to learn how to make an income using adsense."

Reality Internet Marketing: It Does Take Time To Build Your Internet Business. Remember the Story about Magic Stone Soup

You bought into the Internet Merchant Dream. You now have one or more websites selling products online that you are convinced are in great demand. Now that the entire internet world becomes your customer base, you figure that your sales will blossom your websites into a 'Wal-mart of Websites”!

Most likely you have received one or two calls per week from a number of Internet Marketing companies who promise you the glories of improving one or more of these:

1) Your traffic by establishing reciprocal links

2) Your Google Ranking through Hundreds of Directory registrations (registrations that are repeated 2 -4 times each month)

3) Web Traffic through writing articles for eZines and BLOGS

4) Traffic (up from the number of Visitors you now have – whatever that number is) using Marketing using email campaigns

5) Search Engine Page inclusions based on the proper selection, webpage positioning and page density of Keywords, Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords to improve search bot sweeps of your site.

6) Search Engine Page Inclusions with XML and ROR sitemaps for Google and Yahoo Search Bots

7) Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns

8) Web Banner campaigns

9) Advertising Revenue through Affiliate Programs, Adsense, el al

Each Marketing Company will pitch you the importance of their company's offering providing you the “winning formula for the Internet Selling Bonanza”. Well almost!

Take it from me - someone who operated a “mortar and brick” business: a franchise that offered a great new way to merchandise healthy life style products and services. We all want to hear how quickly we can make thousands and thousands of dollars as a Retail Merchant. We all get convinced by a few of these “get the sales quicker” Internet Marketing Companies pitch that their product or service will vault us into Conversions (fancy name for Internet Sales) with unbelievable speed.

We entrepreneurs, each and every one of us, must first buy into the concept, the products, the vision of demand for the products and services offered. Our hope for a successful business, coupled with our zeal to quickly start our business, clouds our vision in applying the basics of building a business. Beware these purveyors of “Business Bliss”!

I am often reminded of a story we read back in elementary school called Stone Soup. It is fable about a traveling Minstrel who had devised a simply ingenious way of obtaining food at each of his stop-over destinations. The housewife invites the Minstrel into her home intrigued by the promise of a “Magic Stone” capable of turning plain boiling water into a delicious soup.

While the Minstrel is stirring the Magic Stone (free for the taking from the roadside) in a huge pot of boiling water, he begins to tell the unsuspecting housewife how wonderful the soup is going to taste. He weaves a tale of a tasty and healthy meal for her family. But then he states, “As delicious as this Magic Stone Soup will be, it would be even more delicious if we added a few carrots.” The housewife always obliged and would eagerly add diced carrots to the Magic Stone Soup.

The Minstrel would continue this charade of suggesting other vegetables to enhance an already excellent tasting Magic Stone Soup. And the housewife, or another person in the village or town, would eagerly add what vegetable the Minstrel suggested to the soup pot. At the end of the story, the soup created was a great soup, filled with vegetables donated by the towns people! This Magic Stone Soup is then shared with the lady of the house, and the whole town. Once he has had his fill of soup, the Minstrel would remove his Magic Stone and continue on his way to the next village or town. This is the technique used by many Internet Marketing Service companies – Stone Soup Selling. They start you with something simple (and free or of little value) and before you know it, you have to invest more of your money and time to make what they originally sold you work.

I will agree that a balanced approach toward applying ALL of the items above (and more) are necessary for getting people to your website. But getting them to move from Visitors (browsers) to Sales Conversions (buyers) requires good old merchandising and pricing and promotion techniques as well.

So don't buy into the Stone Soup 'Quick Fix' messages delivered by most of these Internet Marketing Companies. Like any business, whether it be Mortar 'n Brick or Internet, it takes months to years to build a loyal client base and reap your Merchant Fortunes. Be patient. Be diligent. Apply the many aspects of marketing; whether it is the

FIVE P's: People, Price, Product, Promotion, Place or

FIVE C's: Customer Solution (benefits), Customer Cost (competitive) , Convenience (right to your door), Communication (engage emotion, information).

Remember: there is no such thing as a quick road to riches (at least not morally and legally). There is no Stone Soup. Beware the “Minstrels of who weave a tale of Quick Money”.

Carl Chesal is a business and channel development consultant, trainer, photographer, and avid snowmobiler. He operates BizFare Enterprise Inc (http://www.bizfare.ca) and Foursight Photography (http://www.foursight.on.ca/3.htm), providing business, marketing, and internet marketing consulting services. Carl with wife, Janet, also operate a number of e-commerce web-sites.

Get Great Traffic By Thinking Small

Here is one method that you can use to get traffic to your web site. It relies on choosing some niche keywords based on your web site theme. The process is fairly simple and can be expanded to get tons of traffic to your site. Here is how.

It is often tempting to chase after popular themes and then select the major keyword as your target. However this is not a great move, well, not in the beginning anyway. You first have to build your credibility with the search engines before they will place you near the top.

The key is to choose a keyword phrase that people are using in the search engines such as Google but have very few web sites that cater to that keyword phrase. How do you find such valuable keyword phrases? Here’s how!

If you use a software tool such as Good Keywords or the Google AdSense tool, it will return you many different keyword phrases. Look for specific phrases that look a bit odd. One of the ones that I look for are those that are book titles. Sometimes the words are jumbled but after you have gone through a few of them you will easily recognize them because initially they seem to make no sense. This is often because the words in the title of the book have been sorted into alphabetic order.

If you choose this phrase and set up a web page targeting that phrase, you can then produce a few paragraphs on the book based on reviews at any of the book sellers such as Amazon. You can then have affiliate links to the major booksellers and receive an affilaite commission from them.

I have used this technique to target books on Poker which have attracted traffic where I can offer either the book of their interest or to one of the gaming clubs or to my other web pages on Poker.

A book with a similar title is “Liar’s poker: rising through the wreckage on wall street”. The tools indicate that it was searched for in Overture (Yahoo) 12,043 in one month, so probably 120,000 in Google. Yet depending on how it is entered, Google shows that there ar only 997 sites that cater for that phrase. That’s pretty good odds for you to get a high ranking in the search engines. You can then offer this traffic links to products and services related to the finance industry – a high paying industry.

If you can find other books related to this them, then you can aggregate the traffic through links to your home page. Eventually you will raise your page rank to aa fairly good level.

This is a method that you can refine on an ongoing basis to improve the natural search traffic to your web site.

Ron Skruzny is a webmaster at http://www.criticalmass.biz, a site devoted to Search Engine Optimization. Apart from more articles on SEO, the website also offers lessons and links to a whole range of SEO related resources. If you want to get an increasing level of sustainable web traffic then http://www.criticalmass.biz may have just the right information to help you.

Are You Profiting From Your Whole Website?

You have a sales page or pages, opt-in pages, and thank you pages on your website, as well as any articles and news on there. You have made sure there are links to your subscribe forms on all the pages, so you have just about covered your whole site right?

Not quite, ignoring the fact that you probably have tons of spare webspace left unused, there are more places to make profits on your exisiting pages right now. We're not just talking selling banner impressions or placing Adsense either. The unused, lost profit sections of your website are making those people who know about them a whole heap of extra profits, so where are these places?

We can start straight away with your thankyou pages. Each time a visitor gets to one of these, it means they have placed some trust in you. They have taken on board your advice, and signed up or bought something from you. So while your new customer or subscriber is in this trusting mood, offer them something else. An upsell, a complimentary product, or a free gift for subscribing to another of your lists. Whatever you do, make the most of this chance to make a little extra from someone who knows you offer good advice, but don't insult them with any old offer, or you lose the trust again instantly.

Another place for increasing your profits by using dead webspace is your error pages. You know, those ones which tell your visitor the page can not be displayed, go somewhere else. Instead of that, you can customise these pages, and make an offer to the people who see the page instead of losing them. Don't just send them back to your home page or sales page either, offer a compelling, super bargain on your error page, and capture a customer immediately.

Want to see how much potential just one of your error pages has?

Just look at your stats for your website, and you may be surprised how many people are seeing just the 404 error page, the one that usually says.

"Page cannot be found, this page may have been deleted or moved" or some variation of that message. I checked, and in August 2006, on just one of my sites, that page was seen over 4000 times!

When you started your website, you would have sold your soul for 4000 hits to a single page right?

I know I would, and when I saw this huge waste of potential, I did something about it. It's not even difficult if you can build a webpage.

All you need to do is login to your control panel, (this is for cpanel based webhosts but others may be similar) and click the "Custom Error Pages" icon. Now choose to edit the 404 error page, and replace the message with your own offer instead. Save the file, and go and check your sites new error page by typing in a url you know doesn't exist.

Now you have a brand new page pulling in potential sales without any extra work. We don't suggest you do this to all the error pages, as some can be used to help debug scripts which aren't working, but there's nothing to stop you from looking around your site for other places you aren't using to maximise your profits from your website.

Douglas Titchmarsh writes about Internet Marketing on his weekly newsletter at http://www.cashinonline.info/blog