Advertising your website means sending potential customers to your homepage right? Why not, since it’s the first page you want prospects to see so they can decide where to go next. Makes perfect sense… even though it’s the wrong strategy!

Here are five important reasons why:

• Your homepage serves many types of visitors. You’ve got customers and prospects landing on your homepage. Customers trust you, know how to navigate your site, and are open to discovering something new along the way. Prospects don’t know you, are very impatient, and have one specific purpose in mind. Sound the same? Not at all! You’ve also got homepage users that want to learn about your company, find a job, or need help with a problem. Remember, without a focus on prospects, it’s hard to turn them into customers.

• Everybody influences your homepage design. Your homepage reflects that great tradition of democracy… everybody gets a say! Marketing, sales, editorial, technology, and let’s not forget the CEO, each has an opinion on what the homepage should look like and how it can serve their (often conflicting) interests. So don’t be surprised if your online sales numbers aren’t what you’d hoped for.

• Homepages are about navigation… not sales! Most website visitors are thinking: “just passing through”, when they land on a homepage. That’s why good navigation is a rule of homepage design. But having your homepage be the first page a prospect sees also means they may be tempted to navigate to a place where it’s much harder for you to convince them to buy.

• Homepages have many distractions. Blinking ads, breaking news stories, and featured products… not to mention some person talking in a video! How will your prospects know where to click? Your homepage can be like an unfamiliar mall during the Christmas shopping season when you have one last present to find. Do you really want potential customers feeling like that?

• Homepages are hard to optimize. Your homepage serves multiple audiences and purposes, so it can be hard to optimize since there are lots of trade-offs to consider. Too many when compared to a “landing page” that has only one goal in mind: get the prospect to order the product, fill out the form, download the white paper… or whatever action you want your prospects to take!

Instead of using your homepage, you need to create a landing page customized for your ad campaign, target audience, specific offer… you get the idea! And landing pages are easy to set up and optimize, especially when compared to your homepage.

Your website is up and ready to go. Not to mention you’re chomping at the bit to make some serious money online. But don’t kid yourself. It’s going to take awhile to generate enough traffic to create a profitable business. And this assumes you have something unique to sell which will get prospects coming back… plus telling everyone they know about your website. How long will it take? Think twelve months at least… and most likely longer (sorry!).

But don’t worry. You just need to be patient and willing to work hard to spread the word about your fledgling website. Having some advertising budget helps too… like with any other business.  And since I’ll be the first to admit that the world of online advertising is confusing, complex, and cluttered… we’ve put together a roadmap to help you navigate:

• Search engine optimization. Make it easy as possible for your website to show up in the first page of Google search results. How to do that? Follow SEO best practices. Better yet, make them a way of life. Otherwise, your website becomes a tiny needle in a really big haystack… and prospects will never find you on their own. Not sure where to start? Check out the book: “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization” by Rebecca Lieb, on Amazon.com… and take the time to read it.

• Press releases. Get in the habit of doing press releases (at least one per month). In today’s web world, press releases can and should be an important part of your strategy to get the word out about your business… even if you’re a one person start-up working from your kitchen table. There are free and very affordable services ($25 per release) such as Free Press Release and 1888 PressRelease. So don’t hesitate to start making some news!

• Web Directories. Millions of people search web directories every day to find a business like yours. So definitely submit your website to online directories. Good ones include: Dmoz.org, Yahoo! Directory, Best of the Web, and JoeAnt. There are also web directories that specialize in blogs (e.g., BlogCatalog), local markets (e.g., Local.com), and industries (e.g., Business.com). Many are free but some do charge an annual fee (i.e., $20 to $300)… and you can also pay to advertise and get a more prominent listing.

• Internet Yellow Pages. Yes, it’s the online version of the tried and true yellow pages. Simple enough to understand right? For example, check out YellowPages.com, SuperPages, and Yellowbook. Each of these offers a free listing for your business and you can also pay for a more prominent listing… again, just like the regular yellow pages. A must for local online businesses!

• City Guides. These websites are more about “what’s great” and “what to do” in your local area, and user reviews and popularity are important factors in determining which businesses get the most attention. Citysearch and Yelp are good examples. And like the web directories and Internet yellow pages, you can get a business listing and pay to promote it in search results. Another must for local business owners.

• Paid Search. Of course, you can always pay Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines to show up in their search results as a “sponsored” listing. For example, if you’re a dentist located in Chicago, it may make sense to buy a paid search ad for the keywords “dentists, Chicago” to drive local prospects to your website. The good news is you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement. But setting up, testing, and managing paid search programs can be very time consuming and complicated… so you may want to turn to firms like Yodle or ReachLocal to help out.

• Display Advertising. There are thousands of quality websites and blogs you can “display” your ads on. The key is to find sites that reach your target audience and make sense given your marketing budget. For example, try out Leadtail (our service) to find out where you should advertise online. Keep in mind that display advertising helps generate awareness for your business but not necessarily lots of visitors to your website. But awareness matters, since we tend to buy from companies we’re already familiar with. 

• Ad Networks. You’ll probably hear about ad networks (if you haven’t already). They make it easy to run your ad on thousands of websites and blogs… depending on the consumers you’re trying to reach. For those on an extra limited budget (aren’t we all?), take a look at BuySellAds.com, Performancing Ads, and BidVertiser where you only have to spend a couple hundred bucks a month to advertise your online business.

• Email List Rental. You can rent email lists and buy ad space in email newsletters that cater to your target audience. Just make sure the lists are “opt-in” as you definitely don’t want to “spam” anyone. And don’t forget to start building your own email list right away by offering your website visitors the opportunity to sign up to receive something from you (e.g., your email newsletter).

• Social Media Marketing. There sure is a lot of buzz about Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn… to name a few social media sites. And whether or not you understand what these sites are all about… your business needs to participate. It really does. So invest the time to learn how social media marketing can help get people talking (or tweeting!) about your website.

• Affiliate Marketing. Why not have other websites (i.e., affiliates) market your products for you? And when these affiliates send prospects to your site that purchase your products… you pay them a percentage of the proceeds (i.e., commissions). Makes sense right? There are lots of companies that’ll help you find the right affiliates for your business. Check out AffiliateTips.com to learn more. This is a must for online retailers!
  

• Article Marketing. Your prospects like to read articles related to your products, services, or industry. So go ahead and write lots of relevant articles and post them to article directory sites such as EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, GoArticles.com, and Buzzle.com. And with each article you submit, you get to add your bio and a link to your website. This means you’ll be establishing yourself as a thought leader with your prospects… while also increasing your site traffic!

This online advertising roadmap has plenty to get you started… so use it like a checklist. And when you’re ready to learn more, just do a Google search using the above bullet point titles as your search terms (e.g., “display advertising”). Of course, you still have to decide what makes the most sense given your particular business, target market, and budget.

Now take a deep breath… and get going in building your online business. You can do it!

When it comes to online advertising, Google and other “paid search” providers have us convinced that it’s all about “clicks.” How many clicks did your paid search program generate? Which ads generated the most clicks? What are you paying per click? You get the idea!

But wait a minute… just because someone clicked on your ad doesn’t mean they’ll buy your product or even give you a call. Far from it! As a matter of fact, many website visitors that result from your advertising efforts will never buy from you. Why? Because they leave your site within seconds of arriving (i.e., they bounce), which means they have no interest at all. So forget clicks… you need to first understand bounce rate when evaluating your online advertising performance.

Why is bounce rate more important than clicks? Because bounce rate is a good proxy for how many unqualified website visitors you’re paying for. As a matter of fact, these visitors are so unqualified they don’t even stick around long enough to find out what you’re selling… let alone buy from you. But you’re still paying for every click that sends them your way.

Here’s some quick math to put it in costly perspective:

Let’s assume you spend $1,000 with Google to send 1,000 visitors to your website. Let’s also say that 60% of these visitors leave within ten seconds of arriving so your bounce rate is 60%. This means you paid Google $600 (60% of $1,000) for clicks so unqualified they barely lasted seconds on your site!

Now it’s time for the obvious question: do you know the bounce rate of your advertising campaigns? It’s easy to find out if you have web analytics set up for your site. Just look at your web analytics’ dashboard and start paying attention to your “bounce rate” stats. And if you’re not using web analytics then now’s the time to start!

With that in mind, here are some guidelines for improving your bounce rate:

• Track ad campaigns separately. Make sure you’re evaluating the bounce rate for each ad campaign. That way you can quickly get your arms around which campaigns have the highest bounce rate (i.e., most unqualified visitors) and the lowest (i.e., most qualified visitors).

• Stop poor performing ads. That new text ad may be generating a ton of clicks but what’s the point if your bounce rate is 98%? This example may seem extreme but once you start focusing on bounce rate you’ll see that (unfortunately) it’s not. Simple solution: stop running ad campaigns with high bounce rates… or at least, rethink what you’re doing.

• Send visitors to custom landing pages. Maybe your homepage isn’t the best place to send visitors once they’ve clicked on your ad banner. If you’re running a promotional offer, you should instead send them to a “landing page” that’s been customized for that offer. Who knows… you might discover that more of your clickers are qualified prospects after all.

• Test, test, and test some more. As every good marketer knows, it’s all about testing and optimizing. Now that you’re focusing on bounce rate you should do the same! Test different types of ads, placements, keywords, landing pages… you name it. You’ll soon find a good balance between what you’re paying per click and lower bounce rates.

All sounds great right? But I bet you’re still wondering what benchmark percentages to use to determine good vs. bad bounce rates. Ask the experts and they’ll be quick to say, “It depends.” But I never find that very helpful so I’ll go out on a limb and offer a simple benchmark. Shoot for an average bounce rate of under 50% for your online advertising efforts.

Just keep in mind that we’re talking about your ad campaigns. Bounce rates from visitors that type in your URL directly or that come from natural search should be much lower… but don’t be surprised as they’ll bounce too!