Holiday Online Advertisting – Are You Ready or Is It Too Late?

It is the end of September and there are only approximately 88 days left to shop for Christmas – depending on when you read this of course – but for the sake of my blog I am sticking to 88 days based on the day I have written this.

Halloween is around the corner and following that will be Thanksgiving, then Black Friday followed by Cyber Monday is your site ready for the season? If not you are losing out on prime time! Get yourself in gear and get your advertising campaigns fully functional. Kick start your marketing efforts with a Pay per click advertising campaign. There is no better time than the present to focus on a strategy that targets holiday shoppers then right now. If you wait any longer you are seriously going to miss the season completely.

Google AdWords has made advertising fairly easy for first time online marketers. They give you two options for an account, a Starter Edition or a Standard Edition. If you really want to make the most of your online efforts you really should just go for the standard edition this way you can create it and optimize it effectively. All you really need to do is go to Google AdWords register for an account, create your ads that are relevant to your business and choose your keywords with the Google Keyword Tool and you are off and running.

Here are some stats for you if you are not a believer, according to comScore, online consumer spending grew 26 percent in 2006 to $24.4 billion. More than 80 percent of consumers did at least some shopping online (BizRate and Shop.org Holiday Mood Study 2006), and 50 percent of shoppers bought more stuff online in 2006 than 2005 (NielsenNetRatings research). I would say those are some telling numbers.

Here are some tips for you:

1. Focus on the Holidays and create campaigns that geared toward those shoppers by creating titles that are specific to holiday shoppers. Choose keywords such as “Christmas Gift Ideas” or “Creative Christmas Gifts”.

2. Create an offer that will be enticing for this time of year with discounts on shipping if possible. I do all of my Christmas shopping online for my daughter, who is 9, so I don’t have to deal with the nightmare at Toys R Us, which is by the way instant headaches for me – and if I can order the same thing online that I can get in the store without paying shipping then I am in!

3. Make sure that your landing pages are also relevant to your keywords. Nothing is worse than offering a promotion for an item and when you click to the website you cannot validate that the offer is real. Please do not make me search around your site to find the offer that was presented in the ad, because if I don’t see it on the first page you bring me to then I will be gone. You can lose a visitor that quickly! Make sure your promotions are visible within the first click.

There is still time to jump on board but don’t wait too long because before you know it Thanksgiving will come and go, and the next thing you know you will have a champagne glass in your hand wishing people you don’t know a Happy New Year!!

Marketing is Essential

My name is Melissa Cartagena, I am an Internet Marketer who is focused on educating small to mid-sized businesses on how to become successful online. Many people build a website thinking that once the site is launched traffic will come. Remember the saying, “Rome was not built in a day”? This statement could not be truer as new business owners enter the world of e-Business for the first time where expectations and realizations on the internet are very different than that of their own.

Currently I am focused on building and managing an Online Marketing Team with a very large privately owned web services company who consults and manages Pay per click and Search Engine Optimization campaigns for small to mid-sized businesses that are experiencing the challenges of advertising their website online.

My role is interesting because I have the opportunity to speak with many types of entrepreneurial spirits in many different vertical markets. It is rare that I work with just one market for an extended period of time which captivates my attention since it is constantly changing and evolving. Even though there are many types of markets typically the essential principles of marketing remain the same. Any company who takes their business online will find that marketing is essential as it relates to online exposure, and generating leads or sales to any one website.

With this blog I plan to discuss the options, as well as the challenges, associated with starting your own business and how to increase exposure in addition to continuing to drive the right kind of traffic which will ultimately drive the right kind of business a website needs to be successful online.

I hope you enjoy what you read and I hope you learn something new that will help you grow your business online.

Melissa Cartagena
President, Marketing is Essential