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Where to spend your marketing budget for your business in the beginning



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Where to spend your marketing budget for your business in the beginning

We all start out journey online not knowing exactly what to do, but you're in luck because I'm going to give you some ideas of where to spend your money at the beginning of your marketing journey!  When I started out, I didn't have anyone telling me what worked and what didn't, it was just trial and error the entire time and I didn't know someone was going to fail until I wasted money on it.

You never know what is going to work for your business because everyone has their hands in different industries, meaning one marketing plan won't work for your second and third website as well as it worked for your first one.  The one thing that is constant is what types of marketing you should work with, but alter it to fit your website so you're successful with everything you do.

Below are a few things you should focus your budget on in the beginning of your marketing journey, and they are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A lot of people will start doing their SEO themselves, but this isn't always the best thing to do because it's actually a quite difficult task to do on your own.  People always think you can place a few links around the internet and get top rankings, but it just doesn't work like that, and that's why you might want to put some of your funding into the search engine optimization of your website.

If SEO isn't within your budget, come back to it later on, because you can still create sales without it and be successful.  You'll ALWAYS need SEO, so never forget about it, just come back if you can't afford it right now.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
When you put an ad on the search engines, you're likely going to pay per click or per measure, and this is pretty standard when it comes to marketing a business online.  Yes, you'll pay for each click you get or per 1,000 impressions your ad has, and you could spend a lot of money on this if you don't monitor it.

What you'll want to do is get super targeted in the beginning so you're 1,000% sure your clicks are from people actually looking for what you're selling or offering.  I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to help someone with their campaigns and they're targeting every single country in the world, with broad match keywords, and not really getting specific on anything.  They were literally opening up the flood gates on their profits and spending everything they could on PPC and not seeing much of a return, or any at all.  Don't be like this, get specific and broaden your horizons later on if you want when you're successful.

Banner Ads through BuySellAds
BSA is a great place to find some advertising space on 3rd party websites.  You can find niche specific websites based on their categories or you can do a keyword search to find specific websites that show up for your own criteria.  What you'll do is purchase an ad spot, upload your banner to the dashboard and hope the 3rd party website owner will accept it.  The owner will likely accept it, I've only had 1 ad rejected, so just be sure your ad isn't extremely flashy and you should be fine.

Be sure to do your due diligence before choosing an ad placement on a website.  Yes, they have some websites that show big numbers in terms of traffic, but I've found a few websites that are pure trash because their traffic is 99% botted.  A quick statistic, I purchased a $100 ad on a website that put my banner at the top of their SEO related website and they were claiming to get 900,000+ unique visitors a month.  To anyone out there, this is a great price for an ad that will be seen by 900K or more people in a month because that would mean at even a 0.01% click-through rate I'd get 9,000 clicks to my website where they would likely want to purchase something.  If I were to get just 1% of those 9,000 to make a purchase, I'd have 90 sales from my $100 ad purchase.  My lowest profit per purchase was $10, which means I would have made $900 from this one ad, but I didn't get a single purchase....

You need to be careful what you buy in terms of banner advertising, but there are some nice little nuggets on BSA that are worth buying, so just sift through all the websites and be sure you know what you're buying Where to spend your marketing budget for your business in the beginning

Banner Ads on private websites
Just like BSA, you can put banners on 3rd party websites, but you need to be actively searching for niche related ones that don't think about selling ad space.  These ones can be found by doing keyword searches in Google, Yahoo, or Bing and seeing what pops up.  You can then contact all of these websites to see if they offer any sort of advertising or do a simple search around their website to see anything related to "Advertise" because a lot of them will likely have that in the footer Where to spend your marketing budget for your business in the beginning  What you'll want to do is CTRL+F and type in "Advertise" (without quotes) to see if anything shows up.

Track everything so you know what's working
If you're not tracking anything, you won't know what's actually working and what you're wasting money on.  You can use UTM tracking with all of your URLs and see what is sending you the most traffic, sign-ups, and sales to be sure you know which ads are the best and which ones need to be cut from the rotation.

Never keep an ad live just because you're getting a lot of clicks.  You're not in business to get clicks on your ads, you need to make money, so remove any of the high clicking expensive ads where those funds could be more strategically placed for 2 or 3 different ads that produce the same amount of traffic but much more in sales.


In conclusion
Advertising and marketing a website isn't always an easy thing to do, because it takes time to learn, but you can always outsource this work to a credible company that understands everything.  Obviously, you'll want to try everything on your own in the beginning, except for SEO, because you could save a lot of money.  If you are trying your own SEO in the beginning, be sure to read everything you can before placing a single link because it's easy to gain a penalty but difficult to lift it.  And overall, you need to track everything so you know what is working and what is a garbage ad that was inflated by the seller, then remove what isn't working and keep the rest.

Remember to follow me!
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey


Thanks!

Tommy Carey

Comments

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kgord
I think those are all great suggestions. I think trial and error is the best way to find out what works and what doesn't work for us in terms of giving our business a marketing boost. Excellent suggestions as usual.



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Barida
Trial and error might work in some instances and not in some others. However, I look at situations where giving the job of marketing your website to a good company is the best way to go as you get to realize that the efforts you put into it might not be the best way to go.



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kgord
What instances wouldn't it work? You have to experiment to see what is going to work in your particular situation. You can't start off just assuming everything you are going to do is going to work like clockwork.At the very least tweaking is involved.



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DenisP
Depending on what kind of website you're running, you can still work on improving SEO by purchasing plugins designed to help with optimizing search engine keywords. For example, if you have a WordPress blog, there are plenty of premium plugins designed with the intention of helping you improve SEO for all of your content. Search engine optimized content is also fairly cheap to come by these days. There are plenty of skilled freelancers out there who create SEO ready content for really low prices. It can help you boost the amount of content on your site at first.



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Corzhens
You forgot to mention the cost of the plug-ins for the keyword search in Wordpress. I am in the hunt for more ways and means to get traffic. Wordpress is very popular and even without a survey I know that Wordpress users are getting to be the dominant force in the industry of blogs and other sites for contents that an added SEO method should be studied for more benefits from the search engines.



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treecko142
I think the most important takeaway from this article for starting business owners is that you should keep track of the returns for each marketing tool so that you can find out which is the most cost-effective for your business, so that you can then save money by stopping whatever strategy is not working.



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TommyCarey
I agree.

When you're starting out you need to make sure you're tools or systems are making you money. If you're investing in some sort of SEO software and thinking you're going to be rich in a few days, you're likely going to be excluding that piece of software from your next plan of action.

If something can give you a positive return on your investment, it's worth keeping around as long as it stays stable or improves gradually. I've had plenty of things pop up and I would purchase them because I thought they would help me out tremendously, but they ended up being duds that needed to be taken behind the barn and shot, and that's exactly what I did (I didn't really shoot them, I just discontinued them lol).

Understand what's making you money and scale it up to bigger profits. If you can do this a few times you'll have a full-time income and hopefully in a year or so you're one of the people who is posting a success story talking about how you made your first million dollars online Where to spend your marketing budget for your business in the beginning



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treecko142
Yeah, and if you start a business with a mindset that you're going to be rich in a few days, you likely won't succeed in the first place, given that having a business is a continuous process. After you did your planning and implementing any strategy, you should always have a 'controlling' or monitoring stage where you evaluate your current situation and adjust accordingly to suit your goals.



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kgord
I think that is true, I mean it is hard to know what is working and not working if you are not keeping track of it. It is simply one of the ways that you can learn what is effective on your website.



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overcast
I think if you have low budget the best option would be blog posting and the guest blogging. And then comes the other options like social media and PPC. But apart from that I'd say not many good options are out there. We just have to struggle up a bit on that part. PPC once you have decent budget can be a good option. But initially even the forum backlink can be a good start.



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Martinsx1
All the points that are discussed in this article makes very sense and once you have made sure to do things well, your budget is definitely going to get you the required effect you desire from. But it's very important that when starting a business, it's best to keep budget at an average level because you cannot be sure how things would go. Better be careful then careless.



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vinaya
Your point regarding SEO is very true. Like many people, I do my own SEO. I have limitations, therefore, my SEO strategies are not bringing me results. I am not investing on SEO for a couple of reasons. I have limitation of budget and I cannot hire the best SEO expert.
Search engine marketing is a good strategy. However, I have never done search engine marketing for my websites.
Mt marketing experience is only limited to social media marketing. I have advertised on facebook.



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bienn05
I think using PPC is good. Like in Youtube, brands are recognized and remembered when they saw it somewhere in the videos of there favorite Youtubers. Personally, I remembered almost all ads I encountered in videos and they are playing in my head. I think PPC is a very effective way.



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Corzhens
I agree that a website needs SEO because a good SEO ranking can give the website a good number of traffic. For a business, you have more chances of getting a sale when you have prospects from walk-in visitors. And if you have a budget to hire an SEO specialist or a virtual assistant to do the SEO work then do it for it can greatly help your business.



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kgord
I think of all the things you mentioned SEO might be one of the most important as you have to get the word out. It is simply one of the issues that businesses might not pay as much attention to as they probably should. I think it is should also be part of a marketing strategy.



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esteban123
I think Pay per click is a good strategy to introduce or to market something to other people since they are being motivated to click on your ads because they are receiving a few cents rewards which is not really a big expense for a successful ads.



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Corzhens
I understand that doing SEO work for your website is not the best thing to do. However, I find it the cheapest and the most practical when it comes to the budget for promotion. Especially if you have the time to spend for the SEO work, you will probably focus on that chore every day and just wait for the effect. And although the effect of SEO work is not clear on when to take effect, it is all right if you have the patience.



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