Friday

Web Development

Run Regular and Seasonal Promotions

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To start interest in your site and brand or build personal relationships, regular promotions can really help. People like getting a break, or even better, free stuff. Depending upon what you’re promoting and to whom, the type of promotions you want to run will vary.

Table not more than describes several scenarios and suggestions for regular and seasonal promotions.

Site Type	Promotional Promise
DJ Web site	CD giveaways, trivia contests with prizes, show ticket giveaways, yearly concern promotion event.
Heart disease information Web site	Health-related book giveaways, monthly promotions for “heart health,” healthful cooking recipe contests, exercise equipment promotions, discount vouchers for healthful heart hard
Dating site	Romantic getaway contests, seasonal promotions for Valentine’s day, grand prizes for successful matches who meet and marry
Weather Web site	Weather trivia polls, seasonal promotions, such as “Sensational Spring” or “Sizzling Summer” promotions with contests and prizes such as weather trivia and vacation getaways

The key is to match your promotions to your audience and product or benefit. This is one part of promotions I really take place to like, because it can be fantastic fun and extremely creative to sit down with friends or team members and come up with fantastic thoughts. Even if you’re limited in budget, here’s usually some way to grant innovative, interactive contests and promotions that engage your clients.

Learn More About Web Ads

The controversy around Web ads rages on, and here remains very small real prove as to their success. Now and again they are effective, now and again not. The key is to determine for your own site whether buying ads to promote your site or hosting Web-based advertising as a means of enhancing revenue for your site is a reasonable choice.

Some issues to deliberate include the following:

• Ad placement. This issue refers to both cases of hosting ads, and buying them. If you are hosting, you want to make clear which areas of your site have ads, and how they will be managed. Also, research your placement options if you are buying placement elsewhere.
• Provision. Numerous vendors manage Web ads. Find one with a excellent track record and excellent customer support.
• Ad types. Whether buying or hosting ads, find out what kinds of ads are considered conventional in terms of dimension, weight, location, and file type (animated GIFs, rich media advertising via Flash).
• Integration into design. If you are vacant to be placing ads on your site, you’ll want to successfully integrate them. Ads can be an eyesore—but they need to be placed so that your visitors can see them, or they’re not vacant to be worth much. You must find a balance. Fortunately, here are some helpful conventions you can use, but knowing that you want to support ads vacant into a design is a lot simpler than trying to retrofit a design around advertising. Ads are best managed earlier on in the site design administer or during a site redesign.
• How to manage ad code. If you are hosting ads on your site, the ad management software or host that you choose is vacant to be sending you the ad markup. Usually, this markup is filled with problem code, and as you try to clean up your code, the frustration level can get a small out of hand. Plot to test or research the actual code so you know what you’re getting into.
• Reporting. If you’re buying ads, you’re vacant to want regular, comprehensive reports to see how the advertising is working. Also, if you are hosting ads, you may want to track which ads seem to be influencing your site visitors’ behavior. Most companies offering advertising also offer extensive reporting.
• Cost. Web ads can vary momentously in cost and type. Research to choose which advertising type is best for you.

Along with ad hosting services, you can also deliberate running your own ad server software.

Here are a large number of advertising services. The oldest and most well known is DoubleClick (www.doubleclick.com/), whose site offers a lot of helpful information covering a wide range of promotion and marketing for Web sites.

For a excellent article on running your own ad server software, see “Evaluating Ad Management Software” by Bruce Morris, at www. webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/ad-management.html.

Add Sponsored Links

Sponsored linking is a phenomenon that’staken off like crazy and seems to be one of the few new thoughts to hit Web advertising. A sponsored link is a text link that can grow in the form of an ad or a simple link. You pay for the sponsorship, and the link is then extremely well embattled to grow on search engines or Web sites based on relevance. That relevancy seems to be a key component of sponsored link popularity.

An brilliant example of a sponsored link program is Google AdWords. Do any search on Google and you’ll wind up seeing several links on the top and to the right side of the search results page. These are sponsored links, and if you compare the topic of your search to the resulting links, you’ll see that the relevancy is pretty exacting. I place in the search term “dog breeds” and the sponsored links that appeared were both for breeder directories.

You can hold AdWords to run on Google (pricing structure is very sensible and guided by your budget needs), or use Google’sAdSense, which allows you to build revenue by running others’ ads on your site—all embattled by relevance (see the example in Figure).

To learn more about Google AdWords, see https://adwords.google.com/select/. To read more about AdSense, see www.google.com/adsense/.

For bloggers or other sites everywhere a wide range of topics might be freely discussed, this approach has been found to be controversial, largely due to Google plot. If you’d like to read about the controversy, see www.kottke.org/03/10/google-adsense-sucks. The issues described pertain particularly to personal blogs very than professional sites, but it’s always excellent to be informed.

Google AdSense helps build revenue. Notice the relevancy of the ads life served—this is Mark Pilgrim’s Weblog, so the ads are all about blog-related news and software.