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One can discuss advertising for a very long time. And it will take even more time to discuss advertising on the Internet. What is the essence of advertising on the Internet? How efficient is it? How expensive is it? People who have encountered this extremely interesting phenomenon – advertising on the Internet – for the first time surely want someone to answer these questions. Well, let's try to do it together.
So what is the essence of advertising on the Internet?
Advertising on the Internet is a kind of advertising that uses various Internet media. Internet has become an integral part of the life of modern consumers, and quite often the World Wide Web replaces everything: TV, entertainment, shopping. Therefore we can say without any doubt that advertising on the Internet is a powerful way to attract the consumers' attention to some product or service.
Advertising of a websites starts from the very beginning of its development. To this advertising we can refer well-thought-out design, easy-to-use navigation, high-quality content. If you made rough mistakes at the beginning of website development, its further advertising won't be able to save the situation – the site will never become popular and profitable.
When the site has been developed and starts functioning, you should tackle the matter of its promotion in real earnest as promotion of a site is its advertising on the Internet. There are a lot of classifications of Internet advertising, but we think that the most global division will be the division of advertising on the Internet into fair and unfair. For instance to fair methods of Internet advertising we should refer banner advertising and contextual advertising, registration in directories and rankings, electronic mailing lists. To unfair methods we refer spam, pop-ups, and spyware.
Banner advertising on the Internet
Web banner advertising is advertising of products or services with the help of special graphic or animated units that contain hyperlinks – web banners. There exists a vast variety of web banners: from simple static images to reach media banners full of special effects. This kind of advertising is designed to create and maintain the image of the advertised company or product.
The main benefits of web banner advertising: quick start and quick response, targeting (task orientation), easy management (you can manage the time and duration of display, location of placement).
Contextual advertising on the Internet
Contextual advertising on the Internet is more task-oriented. It is an ad unit (usually in the form of a text link, sometimes in the form of a web banner) that is located on a web page the content of which corresponds to the content of this ad unit. In other words, this kind of advertising on the Internet is displayed to those users only who has shown their interest in a certain product or service. If such ad unit is unobtrusively displayed to the users together with the search engine results by a particular query, this kind of advertising is called search advertising. If the advertisement is located on a thematic site, it is contextual advertising proper.
The main benefits of contextual advertising: small investments, no irritating impact on the visitors, the most precise targeting and, consequently, the most interested visitors.
Registration in directories and rankings
Registration in various thematic directories and rankings consists in filling in a special form of request for participation in these web projects. Directories are designed mainly for sorting of websites that will be the most convenient for the users: links within the catalog are united by themes, and themes are united by categories and sections. Rankings show the popularity of a certain website in its area. The higher the site popularity, the higher its position in the ranking.
The main benefits of registration in directories and rankings: increase in target traffic, improvement of popularity ranks (Yandex CY or Google PageRank), availability (registration in many directories and rankings is free of charge).
Advertising on thematic forums and message boards
Advertising on electronic message boards is similar to advertising in newspapers. Just like in common newspapers, advertisements are located in certain sections on a fee or gratuitous basis depending on a particular website. Advertising on thematic forums consists in placement of ads on various forums devoted to a certain theme or sphere of activity. Both these kinds of advertising are well indexed by the search engines and allow to increase the number of attracted clients.
The main benefits of advertising on thematic forums and message boards: low cost (in many cases it is free of charge), good indexing, high level of targeting.
Affiliate programs, link exchange
Link exchange may be free of charge: you place your links on thematic affiliate websites, they, in their turn, place their links on your website. However such free link exchange is not always possible – if your site is young, the owners of other websites will find it unprofitable to place their links on your site. However, there is a way out – you can buy links. There are two main ways to buy links: to discuss the terms with every particular site where you plan to place your links personally or to use the services of link brokers that will undertake the search of affiliates and negotiations about the purchase terms.
The main advantages of link exchange: improvement of citation index and, consequently, improvement of positions in the search engine results. Pay your attention! Search engines have a negative attitude toward link selling/purchase.
Advertising in mailing lists
Advertising via e-mail used to be one of the most widespread methods of advertising on the Internet until recently. It consists in automatic sending of e-mails to a group of addressees according to the list of e-mail addresses that has been made up beforehand. The methods used for making up such lists are various: the user has directly expressed his consent to receive e-mails, i.e. he has subscribed to the mailing list; the users who have visited a thematic website are included to the list; the list includes all e-mails taken from all available sources. The last method is called spam and is considered an unfair method of advertising on the Internet.
The main advantages of advertising in mailing lists: in case of sending individual e-mails – provision of individual approach to every client, stimulation of repeat visits of the site, quick notifications about the latest news, changes, special offers.
Unfair advertising
To unfair advertising on the Internet, as it has already been mentioned above, we refer spam, spyware, pop-ups. The main operation principle of these methods of Internet advertising and at the same time their main disadvantage is their forced response irrespective of the user's desire.
The main advantage of unfair advertising: quick effect.
That's all. Unfair methods of Internet advertising have much more disadvantages than benefits:
- the effect of this advertising disappears as quickly as it appears;
- search engines bring the sites that use these methods on the black list;
- users stop responding to such advertising after two or three “bummers”;
- the users consider spam messages harmful and delete them without having read.
Thus we see that advertising on the Internet is various enough. Each of the above-described methods has its own pros and cons. But one of the main indicators of Internet advertising effectiveness is not just the number of one-time visitors, but the number of attracted clients. Of course, it is up to you to decide what methods of advertising on the Internet will be the most effective in a particular case. But if you want your advertising campaign on the Internet to be successful and effective, entrust its conducting to the professional team of web design studio WebStudio2U. Our specialists are experts in advertising.
TAGS
advertising on the internet,
internet advertising,
advertising in mailing lists,
web banner advertising,
contextual advertising,
site registration,
link exchange |
webdesign articles 
