Online Marketing
Online marketing is a specialty of our marketing team here at minimalist.ca. In this day and age, getting a website off the ground is hard without ad placements. Luckily, we are just the firm to make this happen.
There are a number of ways to get a successful campaign going:
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a blanket term used to describe any paid for ad results on a search engine (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) results page. If you don’t understand what SEM is, Google a competitive term like “computers” and observe the results. Any results that are bounded by a tan colored box or that appear in the right hand margin are Ads (they are labeled as such if you look closely). They are all bought and paid for by businesses.
If you setup and manage a SEM campaign yourself, with no research or experience, you are almost guaranteed to lose money. Our experts will slowly build up a campaign that will cost you the least and make you the most. As with website design, we understand that SEM campaigns are geared towards successful sales conversions (be they online or real world) and we will make sure that ads clicked lead to this as often as possible. Examples of SEM programs are: Google Adwords, Yahoo, MS Adcenter.
Ad Networks: There are a variety of premium ad networks that host ads on large content networks consisting of multiple websites. There may or may not be a vetting process to get accepted to these. Direct Ad placements. Placing ads in a search engine is just one way to get the word out about a website or a product. Direct ad placements are similar to SEM, except you need to communicate directly with a website and pay a one-time or monthly fee to advertise with them. There are brokers that deal with large networks of websites. This can be an easier way to get your ad served on multiple, quality websites. The key here is not getting your ads on as many websites as possible, but to get them on quality sites that are in your niche and that have visitors that might be interested in what you have for sale.
Social Media: another relatively new form of advertising that should not be ignored. Advertising on social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) can be done in a number of different ways. One is to pay for direct ad placements (see above). This option is availabe on some of the social networks, but is not as innovative as the other new social means of advertising. What a new media website needs to do is build a successful and popular presence on a social network. This requires constant updates with engaging content that will entice your customers to follow you or to share you with their friends.
Paid Links: Paid linking is frowned upon, so we generally do not do it. It involves paying a website to link to your website in order to ensure you website places higher in the search results. It is frowned upon by the major search engines and, in a worst-case scenario, could lead to your site being de-indexed from the major search engines.