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

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

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   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