AdityaSpeaks

A few months back i went for dinner to a local restaurant here in my city with Uttam, a close friend of mine and another person named Sameer Bhatia, who happened to be Uttam’s friend. Uttam introduced me to him and told me that he is engaged in real estate and construction business. His company was headquartered in our country capital New Delhi with operations all over India. While having a talk in the restaurant, Sameer asked me whats my business and i replied as usual “I do Internet Marketing”. “What the hell is this ?” was his first question after that. I gave him an explanation to the whole thing in 5 minutes. He understood it well. I then asked him whether his company does have a website. He said yes, his company has a website, but unfortunately is of no use. Sameer told me that having the website costs him about Rs. 5000 (Approx 120$) per year of expenditure, but never brings any business to him. I told him that i can bring targetted traffic to his site and hence more business to him. He says, he doesn’t believe me and that having a company website is a useless expenditure and that no one should have it. He wasn’t ready to be agree to my point at any cost. Sameer was completely against the internet marketing world. Our dinner was over by then and while leaving, i just told him to consider my advice that internet marketing could change his life, bring him more business and give him exposure. He ignored my point and sticked to his point, we shaked hands, exchanged our contacts and parted ways.

A few months later, Uttam came for a talk with me and we again went back to the topic of Internet Marketing. After a long discussion, my friend realized that it can really help people expand business with minimal investment. My friend told me that he will try to explain Sameer about the possibilities. He succeeded and Sameer called me to his office when i visited Delhi next time. I walked into his office building and into his chamber. After a warm welcome and some tea and snacks, we started with the discussion on how can this Internet Marketing help his business grow. Here’s how the conversation went -

Sameer: Okay, first of all tell me what exactly is this Internet Marketing you are talking about ?
Me: The answer comes from commonsense. Companies have been using forms of media like the Television, Print Media and Radio for advertising and marketing their products. Internet is another type of media. Advertising and Marketing products and services on the internet is better known as Internet Marketing.

Sameer: What is all that we need to advertise our products and services on the internet?
Me: First step to advertising your products and services on the internet is having a website. A well designed website which provides comprehensive information about your company ,its products and services, its features and uniqueness. Way for people to contact the company etc. The website must be well designed so that it catches the attention of the visitors.

Sameer: Where and how to we advertise products and services on the internet ?
Me: You actually provide details of your products and services your website and advertise the website itself. The ultimate goal is to drive targetted traffic to your website. This will bring more and more visitors to your website and a partcular percentage of the visitors on your website will turn into your customers. The percentage of visitors coming to your website who convert into customers is known as the conversion rate. In certain cases you also have a option for the visitors to buy the product directly from the website itself, by making payments through payment processors , credit cards etc.

Sameer: Okay now i should ask you, how do we drive traffic to our websites ?
Me: Well thats the main thing and is exactly what internet marketing is all about. Driving Traffic to websites. Well, there are many methods to do this like - 1. Placing Advertisements on other high traffic websites , 2. Email Marketing 3. Search Engine Marketing

Sameer: Please explain me about all of them clearly.
Me: Okay lets start with the first one “Placing Advertisements on other high traffic sites”. Well while browsing the web, you might have noticed at certain places, you see some advertisements. When clicked on the ad, it takes you to another site. This is known as banner advertising. Placing your banner advertisement on some other related site by paying the other site owner a rent which basically depends upon the traffic the particular site is having, or the amount of hits it is expected to send to your site. Banner advertising is a old method now and over time has been replaced by CPM ads which we will come to later.

The next thing is Email marketing. It is nothing but sending mass emails about your site to many people at once. This method has been associated with many complains and perhaps, not a trusted method and also illegal in some countries.

Next comes Search Engine Marketing which is the most happening form of internet marketing. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has again two aspects and they are - 1. CPC and CPM ad networks and 2. Search Engine Optimization

Sameer : What is a Search Engine and Search Engine Optimization ?
Me : Internet search engines (eg Google, AltaVista) help users find web pages on a given subject. The search engines maintain databases of web sites and use programs (often referred to as “spiders” or “robots”) to collect information, which is then indexed by the search engine. Similar services are provided by “directories,” which maintain ordered lists of websites, eg Yahoo!. People use search engines to find what they are looking for. Hence search engines are perfect places to market your product. When you needed web designer for your website, i am sure you might have logged on to google and typed there “Web designer in delhi” and then caught the first one there. Hence you became a customer to the person who designed a website for you right ? What if your site ranks no. 1 for the term “Property for sale in Gurgaon”, wont you get tons of customers ? Thats where search engine marketing comes in. A search engine optimizer will make modifications to your site on the site’s pages and also popularize the site using link building campaigns, so that the site becomes more important in the eyes of the search engine and major search engines like google start ranking your website on their top pages for important keywords. Once your site starts ranking for important keywords, you get tons of visitors to your site and hence more business for your company.

Sameer: Okay so thats SEO. I think i have heard about this CPC and CPM some where. Can you elaborate it ?
Me: Well CPC stands for “Cost per click” and CPM stands for Cost per mille (CPM), also called cost ‰ and cost per thousand (CPT), is a commonly used measurement in advertising. In Italian mille means thousand, therefore, CPM means cost per thousand. There are many ad networks which does partnerships with website owners and places ads on their websites. You can use these networks to run CPC and CPM ads. When you place a CPC ad on a network , your ad is displayed on all partner sites of the network and when some one clicks on a ads and comes to your website, you are charged a fees. Such ads are called Cost per click or Pay Per Click (PPC) programs. A leading network is google adwords. It places my ads only on websites related to my theme. CPM programs are similar, but in such cases, you are charged only when your ad is shown 1000 times. CPM ads are better when you are running a banner campaign.

Sameer: So which form of Internet Marketing is better according to you?
Me: Well i have worked on all kind of websites and promotion methods. I completely reject the banner advertising and email marketing forms, as i haven’t seen proper results out of them. The best form of Internet Marketing has been Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and mostly SEO as i talked above. I have carried out many SEO projects and ranked sites of my clients for competitive terms like “Web designing services” , “cheap web hosting services” , “real estate london” etc. My clients are happy with the results. They ranked on the first pages of search engines for their respective keywords and this gave them thousands of visitors to their sites every day, and more visitors means more exposure and more conversions for them.

Sameer: Well so you insist on Search Engine Optimization ? Does that involve some secret tricks to rank the sites on top? Can you teach me SEO ?
Me: I will be very happy to teach you SEO. Well, we dont use tricks in SEO, we use simple and permitted methods to rank our sites in search engines. I do believe that there are certain so called tricks which make you rank well for shorter periods and these are reffered to as black hat SEO tricks which is generally not permitted by search engine guidelines. Once the search engine algorithms come to know that the particular site is using a trick to rank, the site is infact permanently banned from the index which may sometimes be disastrous.

We will continue out SEO lessons to sameer from my next post …………….keep reading AdityaSpeaks