Converting Print Advertising For Use On The Web - A How-To

Contrary to the beliefs of some, advertising for web and print are very different. Converting print ads for use on the web is very tricky. What has been very successful on paper may have no impact at all on the screen. When I am asked "How do I convert my print ads to web?" my answer is simple: don't! Web and print are so vastly different that I believe you should never build your web pages based on a print ad.

There are certain rules that web design must follow that simply don't apply to print. One of my colleagues, Tim Pattison, broke these rules down very concisely recently:

Usability

Browser compatibility

Designing within the constraints of (X)HTML

Accessibility

These are the four rules that web design must follow. I will explain these rules in detail later. For now though we need to talk about copywriting. As I said in my last newsletter Web Site Templates and Their Benefits, the most important part of your website is content. Search engines and disabled users don't care how your site looks. They only care about the information your site presents. The reason I'm coming back to this is to explain that writing web copy is an entirely different ball game from writing print copy. Quite possibly the best resource for writing web copy is the book "Web Copy That Sells" by Maria Veloso. It outlines the differences between the two and gives great techniques to writing for the web. I will be revisiting this topic in my newsletters to come, so make sure you visit often.

The four rules exclusive to web design: usability, browser compatibility, design within the constraints of (x)html, and accessibility, are the four horsemen of doom for the uneducated, inexperienced designer. They are some of the most overlooked aspects of web design, and yet some of the most important. Usability: Unlike print ads, web sites are interactive. Users must be able to easily find their way around, and they need a clear path to the information they are trying to find. If you are selling a product, there needs to be a clear, concise, distraction free path from the home page all the way to the check out page.

Browser compatibility: In a perfect world you could design your web site once and it would look perfect and stay perfect in all browsers. Unfortunately, we live in the real world where some browsers support a set of standards and others simply don't. Actually, the most popular browser in the world has for years lived by their own rules. While MS Internet Explorer still holds the majority of the market share, Mozzilla, Netscape, and Opera have acquired a considerable percentage of the browser market. In fact, it's high enough of a percentage to make Microsoft revise their plans to release IE 7.0. While competition is healthy, it makes for headaches for web designers. It is not uncommon to have your site looking perfect in one browser only to find that your entire design explodes when viewed with another.

Designing within the constraints of (x)html: When you lay out a print ad, you place the images where they belong on the page, draw out any shapes, lay out the colors, and place the text. Then you print it out and make copies. Every copy you hand out looks exactly the same, and there's nothing magic about the way things stay on the page. In web design, everything is held in place by code. You could easily have a four to one ratio of code to content. If you are not familiar with the coding involved in keeping your site looking like it's supposed to, it can be very frustrating laying out your design.

Accessibility: Back to our perfect world - not only would browsers be perfect, but all our viewers would look through the same eyes. Unfortunately, some people aren't blessed with good eyesight or motor skills like you and I. We need to consider that for those who have disabilities, a poorly laid out website can be completely useless. You could ignore that audience, but you would be doing yourself a disservice. And let's not forget, our biggest and most important group of users is completely blind: search engine spiders. They read your website the same way a blind person does. If the layout of your site isn't logical, a spider may leave and not bother coming back for a long time.

Considering these things, I think it is always best to design your web site separate from your print advertising. Always write fresh copy for the web, and remember that it's not enough to write great copy once. You need to update your site regularly to keep the search engines interested.

About the Author
J Hancock is the president and founder of HighTide Web Services. We are proud to be a fast growing, California based web services firm, offering high quality web site templates from some of the best designers out there, as well as excellent and affordable web hösting
HighTideTemplates.com HighTideHosting.com

Big Advertising Mistake - Don't Do This and It Will Save You

Advertising plays an important role in your business (every business, actually!). But, there is one BIG mistake advertisers frequently do and this mistake could cost you a bundle!

What is it?

The fact that you don't analyze what type of advertising is working for you and which are not doing so well!

Analyzing the results of your advertising campaigns will help you determine where your money should go. If you skip this task, then you'd probably spending too much money on a lousy campaign! Of course you don't want that to happen do you?

I know that this task is very time consuming and boring, that's why most advertisers always neglect this one. The fact is, it becomes time consuming and boring if you don't create a system for that. This system should inform you the performance of all of your advertising campaigns.

This is what makes online advertising so great. Many online advertising services give you ad campaign reports on a regular basis. They inform you which ads are working and which ones are not. Although not every type of online advertisings have this feature, one of them who does is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

But what if you advertise in ezines (lots of ezines) and ad classifieds? What if you put several banners and text links here and there? How to monitor their performances?

Well, in case you didn't know, there are some services in the internet which really could track your ads and make your job a lot easier. To learn more about this service, you can go to HyperTracker

Once you know exactly the performance of all of your ad campaigns, here are some steps that can save a lot of your advertising budget:

o Determine Your Target Market

Who would be interested in your products? What problems do your products solve? Believe me, reaching untargeted market would only hurt your advetising budget. Don't go for quantity, but go for quality! Many people love blasting ads to a huge community and ended up with no sales at all? Why? Because they are simply reaching the WRONG people.

o Set Up a Realistic Budget

How much money could you put aside for advertising? Remember, don't waste all of your advertising budget on a single campaign! You have to test what type of advertising that will work best for you.

o A Great Sales Copy

Make people want to click through your URL. Your target here is to make them click, not to sell! Let your site do the selling for you.

o Test Several Ads

Test several ads at the same time. Tweak your sales copy. You'll be amazed at how a little difference you add to an ad could result in a HUGE difference in the response. This part is a lot easier if you use the good old HyperTracker

o Analyze and Re-invest

Analyze your ads performance. Stick to the ones that give you best results. Now that you know what works and what doesn't, you could re-invest your advertising budget ONLY on the best type of advertising.

About the Author

Farid Aziz is a full-time Internet Marketer. Reveal more of his FREE tips and strategies on Internet Marketing and get a FREE Course on How to Make Money Online with Your Hobby at http://www.InternetMarketerSells.com

The Deception of FFA Advertising

FFA, or Free For All sites are the next generation of internet marketing. Or at least that's what many want you to believe.

FFA sites are places where anyone can post a short ad with a link, as long as they agree to accept emails from the site owner. Some of the most popular sites are

(1)ffanet.com
(2)myebiz.com
(3)prolinks.com
(4)kiosk.com
(5)ffamailblaster.com

At first thought this seems like a remarkable way to advertise. But, there are major problems here.

First off, the only way for the advertisement to work is for people to visit the FFA site where it is posted. But the only people it seems that visit these sites are those that post an ad. To make matters worse, 99% of posts are done now through autosubmiters. So who actually sees your ad? Absolutely no one.

You may have received emails from FFA site owners of claiming that advertising via an FFA is worthless unless you actually own the site. Their flawed reasoning (which I will explain shortly) is that as the owner, you get to post your own ads on the site, and better yet, collect the email addresses of everyone posting. Moreover, you receive commissions on anyone signing up to purchase an FFA site of their own.

But wait! It gets better. The same people will claim that when submitting your ad, create a separate email account to store the large number of autoresponder messages you will receive and other advertisements. So, if you don't want your primary email account
to fill up, create a secondary account and simply delete the emails as they come in.

Now i'm really confused. If people who submit to my now owned and paying monthly FFA site, create a secondary email address to submit when posting, only to delete all of the advertisements they receive, why exactly do I want their email address?

The entire logic of using FFA's for increasing site traffic and advertising is severely flawed. What's even worse is that most search engines rank these sites lowly if at all. So where exactly then do you advertise your FFA site?

I performed a very simple test. I created a simple E-Zine sign up form, separate from my site, and used a well known autosubmit software to "Blast" my add to the entire FFA network, which claimed millions of page views per day. Submission was done once
per day, at the same time for a period of 1 week. How many responses? 1! A single response that did not even sign up.

FFA sites for advertising are worthless. You'll hear many argue that they work if your careful. I would like to believe it would. Definitely easy to submit to and the exposure would be phenomenal. The cold hard truth is that they do not.

Below are a few of what I find to be comical ad headlines posted at FFA sites. Enjoy!

(1)"Get your classified ad in 5,000,000 emails and 111,000 websites everyday for free without spamming". (If you follow the link you find that what is being promoted is another FFA site!)

(2)"$1.67=massive income" (I wonder if they know that this is not an equality?!)

(3)"Getting 5,000 opt-in leads daily." (1 year amounts to 150,000 subscribers. Just about the population of a small town!)

(4)"Delivers an endless flood of traffic!" (Perpetual motion?!)

(5)"Retire in months for only $6!" (The state of Florida is about to get an incredible population boost)

(6)"The secret to getting a million visitors to your site!"

About the Author

Dan J. Fry is an independent researcher and owner of e-Kinetic.com, a site devoted to providing resources for small budget home businesses. He has a PhD in Physics and is married with two daughters and two cats. Subscribe to his free E-Zine on home business resources at mailto:e-kinetic@GetResponse.com or by visiting his site at http://www.e-kinetic.com . He can be reached at mailto:comp@e-kinetic.com .

Indirect Advertising

I am reasonably sure that anyone reading this article is familiar with all the free online advertising resources such as the all too familiar Sp-m, Classifieds, FFA pages, Banners, Text Ads, Traffic Exchanges, Newsletters,Guaranteed Visitors, Paid to Read, Paid to Join, Link Swaps, Pop-ups, Other 'In-Your-Face' Ads, and the list goes on and on.

The question I would like you to consider is, when you see this kind of stuff yourself what is your 'Frame of Mind'?

My guess is you know what's coming and your shields go up. You pull up your waders and trudge on through, oblivious to the thousands of messages ricochetting off your armor just so you can collect a few more hits for your own website or offer. With Millions of would be online marketers doing this hour after hour and day after day, is it any wonder that the Internet slows down to a crawl and even stops at times?

So what if you could put your message on hold for a time when your prospects finished their 'Direct Advertising' chores. They have returned to their curious wanderings online, a time when they are now open to checking things out. Instead of shoving your material in their face, they come looking for you to see what you are doing. Maybe even ask a few questions. Kind of like stopping off for a cold one with the gang after work.

The online equivalent to this scene is being played out today and every day and you can participate for free. It is called 'Social Networking' or even more appropriately for us, 'Business Networking' and is easily found with your favorite search engine.

Since this can hardly be considered blatant advertising (at least not directly) I will say the one I am most familiar with and use myself, is the Ryze Business Network. With a free account they allow you to create a 'Home Page' where you can display whatever you want other members to see. I suggest you tell about yourself instead of wasting it on more advertising. Those that visit know that they are on a Business Network and know you are here because you have something for sale.

Now, think about what 'Frame of Mind' you would be in if you dropped by a potential friends page to sign their guestbook, looked over their 'Home Page' and decided to click a few links trying to gain more insight into their personality. You might even be considering an alliance or joint venture with them. Can you see the difference?

You are no longer perceived as a 'Salesman' but a 'Fellow Businessperson' instead. Chamber of Commerce 'Mixers' have been an example of this approach for years and been very successful. Now you can accomplish nearly the same thing for your home business from your computer.

If this all sounds complicated and too hard to understand how it could possibly work, I would suggest getting a free account and give it a try. There is free 'Interactive' on the job training available through sub-networks that fit every imaginable interest, where you can ask questions and read the answers from your peers.

There are facilities to search out those you have a common connection with and they have already given you permission to subtilty contact them by virtue of being a member.
Blatant advertising is prohibited so you will not be bombarded with junk ads. It's more like receiving an invitation that you can read privately and decide if you want to attend.

So now it is all up to you. Continue contributing to the degradation of Internet bandwidth with huge numbers of attempts required (many not even reaching the target) to get a single response, or try something new.

About the Author

Warren Contreras is just another online marketer that puts his pants on one leg at a time just like you. Learn more about him at http://lead-network.ryze.com/

Balancing SEO and Other Forms Of Advertising

Search engines are by and far the largest supplier of traffic to your web site. Moreover, its targeted, meaning the visitors that arrive at your site were looking for information that you are delivering. At least this is the goal of the search engines: to deliver high quality results to web surfers.

Recent major changes in Google, Yahoo and MSN have put the internet market however in a frenzy. As the search engines battle it out to be the one producing the highest quality results by frequently altering their index algorithm, search engine optimization has taken an almost obsessive importance.

The problem I see is that the battle is not going to end soon and repeatedly trying to stay ahead by optimizing after each re-indexing is truly a never ending battle. A balance must be struck between search engine advertising and other online venues.

Starting out with an online home business business is intimidating. There is pressure to build a quality site, offer valuable information, promote, build subscribers,...and the list goes on and on. Having a few different forms of advertising that you slowly utilize can payoff big in the long run. With a market that can change on an hourly basis, you musn't focus too heavily on any single form of site promotion.

Think of it as your advertising bag of goodies. You reach in and pull out one method and give it a try. Don't dump all of your resources into it. Spread them out. Reach in and pick another, until you have a few in the works. Now pause and see which is working. Tweak a bit here and there and sit back again. Continuously re-evaluating your advertising campaigns, you will begin to grow a deep feeling as to which works for your online
business.

Here are a few types of advertising for your home business you should consider:

(1) Classified Ads - cheap and short to write.
(2) Article submission - write an article and post for free. The rewards reaped can be enormous in the long term.
(3) Paid ads in E-Zines - hit those seldom used small niche markets!
(4) Link exchange - can you bring in traffic from another site? You betcha!
(5) Newsgroup and Discussion lists - join in on discussions and pass out a small blurb about your business at the end.
(6) Sig files - after all your online! Make use of all of the emails you send out daily.
(7) Flyers - yep, offline!

The bottom line here is not to stagnate. Search engines are important but not the only way to promote. Its better to balance your site optimization with other promotion strategies. If one method fails you at least have others to fall back on.

About the Author

Dan J. Fry is an independent researcher and owner of e-Kinetic.com, a site devoted to providing resources for small budget home businesses. He has a PhD in Physics and is married with two daughters and two cats. Subscribe to his free E-Zine on home business resources at mailto:e-kinetic@GetResponse.com or by visiting his site at http://www.e-kinetic.com . He can be reached at mailto:comp@e-kinetic.com .

Cheap Advertising Methods That Work!

Advertising is necessary to get name recognition for your business and attract customers. But, what steps can you take to advertise your business if your promotion budget is limited?

Plenty!

The following methods are some of the best and cheapest ways to promote your business online.

-Start An Ezine That's right! Start your very own ezine. This is an excellent way to get immediate recognition for your business without spending a dime. It's easy to start a special interest ezine on the Internet. Several free list hosting services will handle all the emailing duties and subscribers. Here's one source below:

http://www.topica.com

-Ad Swaps...Once you have an ezine start swapping ads with other ezine owners. You will score big time if you swap ads with a major player.

-Trade Links..trade links with similar sites. Your search engine rank will increase if your site links with many sites. Leading to more website visitors.

-Search Engine Submission. Submit your site to the top search engines. Pay close attention to meta tags and headings to get a higher listing. Sprinkle a few keywords in your web page copy. Here's a few sources to automatically submit your website to search engines.

http://www.addpro.com

http://www.urlsubmitter.com

-Write Articles. Compose articles on popular topics. Submit your work to online article directories. If your articles are popular, you will get immediate free promotion, and recognition as an expert in your field. Here's a good guide to writing articles for the Internet.

Confessions Of An Ezine Writer:

http://hop.clickbank.net/?xy123/johncolanz

-Write An Ebook! Great free promo idea. Need I say more? Write an ebook on a unique topic and give it away to website visitors. Encourage them to distribute to online associates. Include links in the ebook leading to your website.

How to Write your own eBook in 7 Days! http://hop.clickbank.net/?xy123/7dayebook> Click Here

-Signature Files! This is your opportunity to promote your business or affiliate links. Include them in all your emails. Example Follows:

----------------------------------------------------------------

BB Lee is the editor and publisher of SmallBizBits Newsletter.
Visit: http://www.angelfire.com/zine/smallbiz
----------------------------------------------------------------

-Free Classifieds are more important than you think. They give you experience writing copy before you plunk down hard cash on more extravagant ads. Many marketers still manually post their ads and browse the free classified afterwards. A few interested readers will visit your site.

-FFA Links are important too. When you submit to the ffa pages your website's search engine position increases because it links to more sites. (Although it is temporary and you'll have submit on a regular daily basis.) This will circulate your name to a wider Internet market. And before submitting to the ffa pages, get a free email account to receive the multitude of ffa responses. You certainly don't want these responses mixed with your regular email account.

That's it! Experiment with the methods above! And have fun learning what works for you!

About the Author

BB Lee is the editor and publisher of SmallBizBits Newsletter.

Join SmallBizBits Today And Receive Your 5 ebook bonus package.

To Subscribe!...mailto: Smallbiz-subscribe@topica.com

Visit: http://www.angelfire.com/zine/smallbiz

Contact BB... mailto: smallbiz@angelfire.com

4 Steps to Unbeatable Advertising And Still Keep Money in Yo

Advertising doesn't have to wipe out your bank account to be effective. When you learn to negotiate, know when smaller ads are as effective as large ads, ask for discounts, and create an irresistible offer, you're on your way to skyrocketing profit margins!

1. Negotiate
Have you noticed that some people seem to always get the best deals? Yeah, you pay full price and think you did OK until they show up with the same thing, only they paid several hundred dollars less. It really get your goat! How do they do it? They're not afraid to ask for an extra discount.

Yep, don't sell yourself short because you didn't ASK the next time your advertising rep makes an appearance! Even if you're already getting a discount, ask for a bigger one. You have not...because you ask not.

2. Trim
Bigger is always better...or is it? When it comes to advertising, don't be surprised if some of your short ads meet with more success than larger more expensive ads. Trimming down on the size and cost of advertising doesn't mean you'll be trimming the results!

3. Exploit the Freebies
What's the difference between advertising and publicity? ...who's doing the talking. Yeah, when you sell yourself, it's advertising. When someone else is selling you, it's publicity...and it generates credibility and interest that you don't want to miss out on.

Think about the different ways you can get your business in the spotlight. Do you have some news… write a press release? Write some “how to” articles with a short byline at the end and release them to ezines, magazines, newspapers, and other publishers. Why not promote the product of a non-competitor in return for them promoting yours...think of the totally different market they affect!

Yep, there are a lot of ways out there to get free advertisement that will benefit your business. Of course you won't be able to rely solely on the freebies, but hey, you can get a little extra for nothing!

4. Improve Your Offer
Is your deal too good to pass up? If not, you need to improve it. Hey, I'm not talking about cutting prices even more...you've still got to make a profit. You can make the deal sweeter just by increasing the readers knowledge of the value of the product, or adding bonuses that are perceived as valuable, but cost you little.

Motivate buyers with expirations. Yeah, an open ended offer encourages procrastination...which leads ...yep, nowhere. When the customer knows he has until Saturday to purchase an item he'll pay more for on Sunday, he'll make it a priority to head for your shop.

Advertising doesn't have to wipe out your bank account to be effective. When you learn to negotiate, know when smaller ads are as effective as large ads, ask for discounts, and create an irresistible offer, you're on your way to skyrocketing profit margins!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Who is Allyn Cutts, and why should you care?
Allyn has spent over 24 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales to current customers. Allyn is a marketing and sales fanatic, providing measurable marketing solutions that drive huge results for small-to mid-size business clients. Allyn works personally with clients to design and deliver off-line and on-line direct marketing strategies that focus on metrics and measurable results. You can learn more about Allyn Cutts at www.AllynCutts.com and you can call 610.437.4106 between 10 AM and 4 PM Eastern Time Tuesdays and Thursdays.