New Online Advertising Options:

Social Networks, Banners, Blogs and Brand

New Opportunities for Online Advertising

Today's internet marketers extend the reach of their online advertising budgets by adding social networks, banner ads and blogs to their marketing mix. Do these strategies offer the opportunity for success or disaster for your online advertising budget? Will they work to promote your brand or; are they already working to destroy it? It is important to know how to leverage these strategies to optimize your budget and; how to manage them for brand promotion and protection. Optimize your advertising budget and promote-protect your brand online with the advertising research and monitoring service from Pittsburgh Internet Consulting.

Social Network Marketing

If you are in charge of your company's marketing effort, you are probably wondering:

• "Should our company be 'out there'?"
• "Where is, 'out there'?"
• "How do we get 'out there'?"
• "What can we do 'out there' that would make sense for us?"
• AND, just as important: "How did that get 'out there'?"

It seems that everyone is talking about something they read or saw online somewhere. As marketers, we want our products and services to be the topic of the day but, how. If you are promoting the latest MTV star, you have some ready answers. The rest of us are left wondering how to create Social Networking opportunities for products like: frozen vegetables, cancer awareness, industrial saws or nuclear power. For some of these products, creative answers are already generating buzz in the social network universe. For others, the answer is yet to be found.

To date, social network marketing opportunities are most adaptable to brand promotion creatives; B2C products and services; cause/charity awareness and anything that fits into the "edu-tainment" genre. To define the online advertising opportunities for your products and services, it helps to keep that in mind.

Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is one of the best methods for brand building. There are various ways you can utilize banner advertising to generate traffic and promote your brand. Google Ad Words and other search engines offer banner ads in their PPC programs and you can also pick sites that directly relate to your company and products for banner advertising.

Blogs

Blogs can be used to promote your brand as well as your expertise on a particular topic. Blog posts can reach a highly targeted audience - if you choose the right ones to post on. There are 2 approaches to promote your products and services via blogging:

1. post an entry on someone else's blog or;
2. create and maintain your own corporate blog.

Posting an entry on an already established blog is much easier than creating and maintaining a company blog. It can generate good results as long as you follow the rules of the blog. Creating your own corporate blog requires a commitment of time and talent to maintain it if it is to be a successful venture. In either case, blog posts should not be just sales promotion. Blogs are forums for the exchange of information and ideas. It is a great way to establish and nurture customer relationships but, it can backfire if you aren't careful.

Social Networks, Blogs and Brand

Keep in mind that anyone can create a video, story or blog about your company and your products - including ex-employees, unhappy vendors or your competitors. Smart brand managers regularly search for their own company name to monitor results: the good; the bad and the ugly.   They also know how and when to respond to negative information posted to these online forums. Google offers Google Alerts as one method for setting up automatic searches on important brand names.  If you are considering social networks or blogging as a way to promote your business online, contact the online advertising experts at Pittsburgh Internet Consulting for the help you need to succeed.

Affiliate Promotion

Affiliate Advertising is a revenue generating opportunity to consider in your marketing mix. There are many affiliate advertising options available for the customer selling goods and for the company hosting affiliate ads. We do the research and define the best companies for your needs.