Optimizing Search Engine Results, Recovering Your Hosting Costs & Web Based Marketing
There are numerous ways available to recover the cost of hosting your web site. For eCommerce sites, it is often considered recovered with the first couple of sales each month and most often realizing a profit for smaller operations. Some of the recommended methods are through selling banner or block advertising space directly on your site or signing up for free referral services. I have chosen to highlight the services available from Google beause they have provided immediate results for ITBob.net in terms of generated traffic. More on that is explained further down the page but first we must make sure that you get noticed on the web!
Search Engine Results - Before you can effectively sell that advertising space on your site, you must first make sure that your site will generate the necessary traffic in order for those advertisements to be seen by as many potential customers as possible. The easiest way to do that is to make sure that your site pages are optimized with the proper title, keyword tags and most importantly page content. All of these items are extremely important for search engine indexing and will make the difference between showing up on the first page of search results or the tenth page of search results. If a person searching for services that your company offers and enters something very specific such as your company name, there is a good chance you will be on that first page of results and quite possibly the very first. If a generalized search is used, your chances of appearing on that all important first page are greatly diminished. For example, if you search Google for ITBob, this site will come up as the first or second result on the first page. Now if you perform a more generalized search of "web design" "new jersey", this site may not even turn up within the top ten pages only because there are so many design firms sepcializing it web site design within the state of New Jersey. As one more example, one would think that a search for IBM "new jersey" from Google would return IBM office locations in New Jersey as the first result. This is not the case! The first result is for directions to IBM Palisades, a Hotel, Resort and Conference Center. The first listing for a link to the IBM web site is actually fourth or fifth and it is the IBM - Education portion of their Industry Offerings site. To finally wrap up this section, if you are able to accurately predict what searches will be done in order to try and find you or your services on the web, you will be able to easily generate a solid set of page content, page title and keywords for a search engine to index. This will help to make sure that your site and your pages will obtain the highest possible results within the major search engines.
Marketing - Not all businesses can leverage the marketing power displayed by major corporations simply because there is little funding available to them. This is especially true with Non Profit Organizations. But the old saying is true..."You have to spend money to make money." Fortunately, there are a few extremely cost effective ways to market yourself on the web. One such method is Google Awords. Don't confuse this with Google Adsense, I explain this briefly along with Adsense For Content, Adsense For Search and Adsense For Referral below under Cost Recovery as well. You have no doubt seen the Google Adwords program in action when you browse the web but may not have known what is was just by looking at it. Adwords is a web marketing tool for your business. By providing a list of keywords or phrases within your advertising campaign that pertain to your service offerings you can trigger your ad to appear on a site displaying the Google Adsense banner if similar content actually appears within that page. I know, there is that Google Adsense again. Don't worry, it should become clear on the interaction between the two shortly. Now down to cost, and this is the good part. You decide what you want to pay when someone clicks on your advertisement, called Cost Per Click(CPC), and set a daily budget not to be exceeded. This way you are able to tightly control your advertising costs. Your CPC can be as little at 5 cents but it is highly recommended that you increase that to a minimum of 15 to 25 cents in order to increase the chances that your advertisement is seen more often. You can always increase or decrease your CPC as needed at a later date if you feel it is necessary or if you have a larger advertising and marketing budget. The following is a functional example of an Adsense For Content Banner that displays Google Adwords content:
You may see a public service announcement above for donations to the Red Cross or you may see a couple of text ads. If there are text ads shown, they will pertain to the content found in this page itself. Adsense For Content will analyze the contents of the page it is placed, compare it to keywords or phrases found in advertising campaigns and display advertisements that meet the criteria. But what if it displays an advertisement for my competitors? Not to worry, there is an option within the account set up that will not allow competing advertisements to be displayed. For this, I have not chosen that option within the account settings.
Cost
Recovery - As discussed briefly above, you can begin to
recover the cost of hosting your web site through several means.
I will only focus mainly on the offerings by Google called
Adsense For Content, Adsense For Search and Adsense For Referral.
Adsense For Content was briefly explained in conjunction with Adwords.
Adsense For Content is simply a script that can be placed
within your page to display the banner advertisment above.
Your site can earn money based on the number if clicks coming
from your pages and going to the different advertisers sites. Adsense
For Search is simply displaying a functional Google search box on your
site via another script as seen below:
With Adsense For Search, you can allow visitors to your site to search either the entire web or your own site and display the results in a new page. On that results page will obviously be what your search criteria was but there will also be search-targeted advertisements. Each time a visitor to your site performs a search using the box you provide and clicks on one of the advertisers links, your site generates revenue. Next comes Adsense For Referral. Adsense For Referral is revenue generated each time one of your site visitors clicks on a specific link and either signs up for the Adsense service or downloads and installs Firefox with the Google Toolbar. The following are two fully functional links to choose from that can be placed on your site:
For each download and Installation of Firefox with the Google Toolbar, your site will have generated $1.00 in revenue. Referrals for Adsense are a bit more stringent in their payout. As per Google, "When a publisher that signed up for AdSense through your referral earns their initial $100.00 and is eligible for payout, we'll credit your account with $100.00." The catch is that your referral must generate that revenue within 90 days of signing up.
Finally, a sure fire way to generate additional revenue from your site is to maintain and run your own banner or block advertising space. But remember, be prepared to offer your advertisers proof that your site will generate the necessary traffic if they ask. You can set your own rates and choose which content you want to display and how ofter it will appear. Obviously, this method gives you complete control over what is displayed on your site as you may only want to offer space to local businesses and organizations as a way to promote their products and events. Be courteous to Non Profit or Charitable Organizations, offer free advertising space as a way to help promote your own site or business on the web.