I’ve been reading a book called “Search Engine Advertising” written by Catherine Seda. I recommend this book to anyone who is trying to run a successful marketing campaign online: because a lot of us are too busy, or too lazy to pick up a book, I thought it would be nice to share with all of you what I am reading. Here is what I have learned so far:

There are millions of prospects online. Advertisers pay millions of dollars to reach these millions of prospects. Unfortunately, all of these millions of prospects are not interested in your product. Because search engines let the buyer tell them exactly what they want, you need to know your customer. By knowing your customer, you’ll have a better idea of what they are looking for online and where you should be spending your money.

Optimization v. Advertising

Companies spend a lot of money on optimizing their sites for the major search engines like google and yahoo. In short, optimization focuses on designing your pages within to attract spiders. To organically optimize your site, it is necessary to pay an inclusion fee to a majority of top search engines if you want specific pages indexed. While paying this fee, you are not guaranteed of what pages will be indexed by these search engines and you are not guaranteed high rankings on the results pages. If anyone guarantees you placement, run!!!!

When you decide to advertise on a search engine, you are in complete control of everything. You have control of where your company is found on the results pages. You have control of the landing page the prospects find. This means that you have instant visibility of what you want the buyers to see.
You, as an advertiser, have 24/7 control of your campaign. As we all know, you know your business best and you have 24/7 access to change any ad and experiment what is working best for you before you go out and spend the thousands of dollars on trying to optimize your site for the major search engines.

The key ingredient to any successful company is to have a marketing strategy. In you marketing strategy, you should identify the message you want your prospects to know. You should know who your target audience is. You should always define your goals.

More to come in the upcoming weeks:
Jonathan Prescott