Get into their eyes, hearts and wallets – A text ads primer

by: J. E. Johnson
The world of the Internet is full of information. Some people offer it and some people are looking for it. But it can be surprisingly difficult for these two to meet and, more often than not, those that offer the information will have to work very hard in reaching their target audience.There are millions of web sites on the Internet today. Many of these advertise services and products that will probably never be seen by their target audience because they fail to advertise properly.From pop-ups to newsletters, Spam and affiliate programs the amount of advertising used by online companies to peddle their wares is simply staggering. With the popularity of search engines one advertising method in particular has become popular: the advertising text link.But what is this “text link” and why should you care?A text link is basically a simple advertisement that will appear when any Internet user makes a search on a search engine that offers this service. (All of them do!) When an Internet user creates a search for a particular field of interest the search engine will automatically go through its list of text ads and compare the word(s) entered by the user to the words stored in a special list for the ads created by the people who are promoting their website or products. The most appropriate ad(s) for the search is selected and displayed offering a direct form of advertisement that will only attract customers interested in the particular topic.How do you create such a text ad?Making a text ad is relatively easy. After signing up for any of the search engine ad programs that site will provide you with a simple set of instructions on how to set up advertisements specific to their site. And I promise you. ALL of the different search engines have their own unique way of creating those little text ads. But in order to create a proper text link ad we have to use so-called “keywords” to equate our ad to search terms. (Note: Keywords are used by Web surfers to describe what they hope to find when performing a Web search.)Whenever an Internet user makes a search on the Internet the few words he/she used to make a search are considered keywords. These keywords are stored by the search engine to create statistics of what words are searched often and how many of these words actually lead to specific results compared to similar searches. Searching for 'shoes' for example will yield a completely different result as searching for 'footwear' would even though these topics are almost identical.In order to be able to display our ad to as many people as we possibly can we will have to make a list of these keywords that apply to their ads including all alternate words, common spelling mistakes and related topics. Of course to avoid adding hundreds of keywords that will not attract an interested audience (adding the keyword 'sports' to our shoes ad would cause the ad to be displayed more often but would not necessarily mean it would get clicked more often). As a result we have to select the keywords for our ad carefully.To help us with this task many search engines and companies provide tools that make it possible to take a look at the keyword statistics of the search engines. This allows us to select the best (most profitable) keywords from the list and add these to our advertising campaign.With a little updating now and then this text link ad campaign can then potentially provide us with a continuing means of long-term income. Be careful though and monitor your spending until you feel comfortable with the advertisement. It is very possible to rack up a very large bill to the Pay Per Click search engines in a short time by using keywords that are too generic and are therefore clicked on constantly, but with no resulting sales. Be selective in your keywords and start with just a few to being with. Build your list up until you are comfortable with your results. Google and Overture are still the two most visited sites offering text ad advertising. But, if you are interested in other high quality, but potentially lower priced search engines just visit:http://www.sponsordirectory.com/low-cost-ppc/