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 .