Marketing is no different. But most of us learn from trial and error, and generally speaking it is 90% error ! If you add up all the dollar amounts you have spent over the last 5 years to break into the online marketplace, this becomes painfully obvious.
If you do a simple google search for online advertising, you will come up with hundreds of organizations promising you more traffic than there are people on the planet. What they mean is they will separate you from your money faster than you can say 'money'. Think about it for a moment. Company X is selling you advertising for $1000. And where does that traffic and 'clicks' and 'views' come from? From Publishers who are running their ads, whom Company X pays $100. Publishers who are desperate for income of some kind and will drive all kinds of traffic including bot traffic to their website and simulates view and clicks. Fake traffic has become highly sophisticated now.
There are publishers or 'traffic sellers' who are simply placing links inside social media sites such as twitter and pointing those links to the websites that are supposedly getting traffic. Then they hit those twitter and facebook and instagram embedded links with bot traffic at 7 Mach! And poor you looking at all the hits coming to your site are thinking, wow, I sure am getting a lot of traffic from Facebook and Twitter. I better check out that Lamborgini that every online guru is driving nowadays. But strangely enough, no one seems to click on anything on your website. And even more strange, each visit lasts only for 0 seconds. Curioser and curioser it gets! By the time you figure all this out, the cows will come home, and your bank account will take a hike all the way to Siberia.
Google ads are the world's most reliable means of advertising. But remember, Google does not control what the publishers do. Remember that publishers are rewarded for supplying traffic to their webpages where your advertisements show up. Google pays them for this traffic. You pay Google for this traffic in turn after Google adds their margin. So everything hinges on how much you are paying and if the traffic is from real people who are interested in your product or service.
No matter what happens, the publisher gets paid by Google. And Google gets paid by you no matter what happens. The big question is who pays you?! You may or may not see a cent, regardness of whether you spent $10 or $10000. This is where you have to exercise a lot of caution. There is more to Google Ads than meets the eye. It is a powerful tool without rival, and I favor Google Ads over Facebook ads anyday. Check out these books on adgiver.com about Google Ads and Google Analytics. Google Analytics is Google's powerful system for tracking the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.
What is the most cost effective means of advertising? Without any question, the mode of advertising that gives you the most exposure for the least expense is YouTube advertising. But you have to be careful here. There are a lot of YouTube publishers (YouTube Partners, as per the official lingo) who have receive a lot of clicks and views from visitors and they get paid per click or ver view. However, the curious thing is that these clicks and views may not translate into any kind of interest in your product, while your bills for your campaigns pile up.
This is where you have to know how to run YouTube advertisement campaigns properly. You can either use Video Ads in In-stream format, where users can click 'skip' and you get billed if they see at least 30 seconds. Or you can use 'In Feed' Advertising , where the ads run amongst the search results on YouTube. In this second instance, you are not confounded by false clicks or traffic, because there is no way for publishers to rig the clicks. Every click you get in 'IN FEED' youtube advertising is real, and is from folks who are interested in what you are selling. Like I mentioned earlier, check out the 'Google Ads CookBook' on amazon or on adgiver.comamazon.
Paid Advertising done right can give you rapid results, if you have a good product and you are reaching the right folks who are interested in your product. But face it, the moment the ad stops running, traffic drops to zero. And the traffic may or may not be leading to sales. Because customers have a natural suspicion of anything that is advertised, because they are bombarded day and night with ads in every shape and form, that they have become immune to advertising.
It would be true to say that the most money you can make in advertising is not by running ads to sell products but by having advertising space available for advertising middlemen agencies who will pay handsomely for traffic. It is sad but true.
So is there an alternative, where you can actually get people to see your amazing products and actually buy them? The answer is non-advertisement marketing, or content based marketing. You provide content that has value, and in the content you mention the product you want to promote. You have three ways to do content based marketing. Option one is articles such as this , where you provide information of value and you could mention products of interest.
The second and more 'live-wire' approach is to create videos for youtube, which address all kinds of questions and issues that customers are interested in. These videos take time to make , but once you create these videos, they live on YouTube forever and will bring you traffic. Creating videos however takes time, energy, skill and lots of money. It can cost a minimum of $50 to create even one video if you hire someone on fiverr.com or freelancer.com or upwork.com.
You can also use something called the VideoFromText software. This is an interesting windows based software (PC only, not for Mac or Linux) where you can simply type out the 'storyline' of your video and the software generates one or multiple videos for you complete with voice over and subtitles. You can generate a large number of videos on a daily basis and upload them to YouTube. And this is a strategy
This is evolving field where there are as many 'experts' and 'consultants' as there are stars in the sky or fires in hell , depending on how you look at it.
But let us cut to the chase and summarize what really happens on social media. The first principle of social media is great and unique content that is share-able or share-worthy. Once you get this part solved, half the battle is won.
Do NOT buy likes, do not worry about getting likes. There is a clear and simple strategy to getting likes on Instagram which does not involve paying for traffic. Check out the upcoming book "Instagram CookBook " on Amazon.com, part of the cookbook series.
The second part of the strategy is to set aside a few MINUTES every day to submit some UNIQUE CONTENT on instagram every morning. You do not need to pay some disinterested jerk online $100 a month to do that, your success means nothing to him. Do it yourself. Use those 5 minutes that you would otherwise use to look at meaningless news on crapTV.
And resist the urge to use a bot, because Instagram is pretty good at finding bot users and shadow banning their accounts, where your account exists but no one sees it. It is the equivalent of sending your account to the Gulag.
But the main part is to HAVE UNIQUE AND SHARE-WORTHY CONTENT. An easy easy way to make lots of it for Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok. If your campaign is focused on UNIQUE viral images, try out this software contentlamp.com, but if you are planning on using both video and image content for your marketing efforts , try this one instead contentogre.com. It cost a bit more than contentlamp, but it is well worth it. What I like about contentogre is how I can throw in any videos I caught on my phone or downloaded online on free sites, add some 'memorable quotes' from some famous guys like Musk or Confucius , sneak in a product image of whatever I am promoting, and I get these remarkable vidoes and images that are unique and oh so shareable, I get a lot of likes for these beauties on instagram, and I am not even trying!
