Johan

Tips on How to Advertise Effectively When Growing Your Business

When most new small business owners are first starting out, they probably don’t have much of a budget to spend on advertising. However, as your business grows, investing some of your profits in ads can really help boost your business and bring in even more profits.

The main thing to consider is whether or not your ads are getting the best return on investment (ROI). Fortunately, online ads can give you a big bang for your buck if you plan ahead and watch your metrics carefully. Here are some tips on how to advertise effectively when growing your business.

Set a Goal for Each Campaign

Do you want more:
* Traffic
* Subscribers
* Sales
* Brand recognition

This will affect the wording of your ads and which type you will use. It will also determine your call to action (CTA) for your target audience to take the next step now that they have seen your ad.

Niche Ads

One of the reasons online marketing is so successful is that it allows you to target a niche using keywords. Whenever someone searches online at Google, for example, if you have an ad running in their AdWords system, your ad will be shown.

In terms of social media ads, you can choose keywords or interests, age groups and more. Smart niche marketers create what is called a marketing persona – a profile of the ideal customer they wish to target. They might be a woman, married with children, aged between 31 and 40, who has pets, and so on. Social media ads such as those at Facebook would actually allow you to choose every single one of those if you wished to ensure that your ad was not being shown to people who would probably not be interested.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads

The other key feature of online marketing is the PPC ads. You only pay if a person clicks on the ad to obey your call to action. The percentage of people who complete the CTA are referred to as the click-through rate. A good click-through rate means your ad is effective. However, a poor completion rate of subscribers or sales would mean the page you are sending them to is not converting well for some reason.

Create a New Landing Page for Every New Campaign

An easy way to track click-throughs and conversions is to set up a unique landing page for each campaign so you can track the ROI on your ad. If you see your visitors are not converting, you can edit, test and track alternate versions of the page until you come up with a winner. For example, you might change the headline, add more reviews and testimonials, or create a stronger call to action. Tracking and testing does take time, but the higher your conversion rate from the same amount of traffic, the better.

Doing the Math

An average conversion rate would be 1%. That means one out of every 100 people would buy. If you are selling a product for $20, you would need to make sure you were spending less than that on your ads.

But what if you could boost your conversion rate to 5%? Then you would get $100 per 100 visitors. If your ad has a high click-through rate, then you can keep repeating this process over and over again – in which case, the ads will more than pay for themselves.

Know Your Niche

Focus on what your niche needs most, and you should have no trouble coming up with winning products to sell, and effective ads.

The Most Common Types of Online Scams

The internet can be a blessing for most of us, but there are some cybercriminals who threaten to ruin its usefulness for shopping and information gathering by trying to scam unsuspecting online victims. There are a number of common scams to watch out for. Here are seven of the main ones.

1. Phishing

Phishing is when a cybercriminal contacts you to try to get you to hand over your personal information or money. It might also try to get you to download a virus that infects your computer with malware or opens up a back door so they can steal sensitive data such as your usernames, passwords, account numbers and so on. Phishing happens most often via email, but it can also happen over the phone, via text, and on social media.

In particular, beware of online quizzes on social media. They will often try to get your passwords by asking you common questions so they can then guess your passwords in order to access your accounts and so on. Many people base their passwords on birthdays, children and pet names, and so on, so beware.

Phishing emails usually look legitimate, but pay attention to any landing page you might be sent to. They will usually try to make the site appear the same as the original, such as PayPal, but comparing the two side by side will usually demonstrate which is the scam.

2. Keystroke Software

One form of malware captures all your keystrokes, so it can pretty much log every site you go to, your username, and password. This could be a real disaster in terms of identity theft and money being stolen.

3. Sad Nigerians

Believe it or not, this scam still works on some people. It usually involves an email from a desperate Nigerian asking for help in getting a large amount of money from the bank. Those who get hooked in pay small amounts to get paperwork for the transaction and then finally get the money, but all they are doing is putting money in someone else’s bank account, and possibly even revealing their sensitive financial information.

The scam relies on greed and getting lots of money for very little effort, so remember – if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

4. Greeting Card Scams

There are lots of free greeting card sites online, but they can be very dangerous. The images can carry malware that will attack the recipient’s computer and it will often open up a Trojan horse for them to get more information. If you do have to send an eCard, use a reputable site and watch out for spoof sites, such as clones of Hallmark.com.

5. Great Loan, Credit Card and Re-Fi Offers

These also play upon greed and/or desperation, especially when people are struggling financially. But no reputable bank is going to send you these offers via email. And if you have a bad credit score, there is also no way you would be offered the best deals, which are reserved for the best customers.

6. Lottery and Contest Scams

These have also been around for some time and still fool people. The email tells you that you are a winner and need to pay a small fee to get your cash or prize.

7. Ransomware

This is a very dangerous scam that is hard to overcome. The ransomware locks your computer until you pay them in bitcoin. The longer you wait to pay, the more money they ask for. So far, even top computer security pros have not been able to restore data or track down the criminals. Note that if you have a backup hard drive connected to your computer, the ransomware can lock that up as well. Back up all your data in a reliable cloud storage system and avoid clicking on anything that does not look legitimate.