Advertising is a one way communication between a seller and a buyer of a product or service. It is used to provide more information to the customer about the product or service so that the customer may decide to buy from the advertising vendor. Advertising is generally used to attract new customers. By seeing advertisements, current customers continue to believe that what they are using is the right choice. This is called ‘Brand Loyalty’. Once a customer starts using a particular brand, he starts to feel comfortable with it. Also, with the use of advertisements, the idea is continuously reinforced into his brain. Greater the frequency of advertisements, deeper goes the belief of customers that the advertised brand is the best brand to buy.
There are as many modes of advertising as there are modes to reach people. The modes include billboards, television, radio, magazines, newspapers, emails, web pages, mobile messages, video games and many more. Generally, there are advertising agencies that handle the details. The job of advertising is given to them with some basic idea of what kind of impression the advertiser wants to create on the audience. Advertising agencies are a set of creative people. They take the raw idea and convert it into an advertisement by using eye catching visuals, signature tunes, logos, jingles, one liner slogans etc. There is no dearth of new ideas to attract the attention of people.
There is a style of advertising called covert advertising in which the actual message is embedded in some entertainment media. For example a character in a movie displays or uses a particular brand. Remember Tom Cruise displaying Nokia logo on his phone in the movie Minority Report?
These days, with the information technology boom in the world, advertisements are everywhere. Anywhere an audience can access the information, advertisements are there. May it be public places like roads, restaurants, airports, trains, buses, bus stops, shopping marts or the privacy of our homes; they would reach us through the internet or through our phones. Sometimes they are extremely helpful, some other times, quite a nuisance. It is become a necessity as it is very important for the economic growth of a country. And yes, without them we would spend more time deciding what to buy.
In spite of its benefits, advertising is often accused for exploiting young children and for misguiding audience. Spam is an unsolicited bulk email advertising strategy. In my opinion, they do no more than putting unnecessary load on the Internet Service Providers. People generally use spam filters and delete the mails without even reading them.
A large amount of money is spent on advertising. In fact, up to 60% of the cost that we pay for a product or service accounts to advertising. Today, more than $200 billion are spent on advertising only in the United States. Throughout the world, this figure is more than $420 billion. Amazing? Never knew this? Yes. This is true.
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half." This is a famous quote which emphasizes on the importance of market research and targeting on the right prospective customers. If done effectively, this would save costs to the advertisers and eventually to the customers too. Also it would reduce the wastage of resources by trying to sell products or services to people who don’t want it.
Everyone is looking for the perfect marketing success model. If you are a marketer your success model is to market your own products or to promote an affliate products.
Promotion can be done many ways, if you have a website but not much traffic, you would go to a high PR traffic website (most social bookmarking sites are high traffic sites) and post a link to an article you would have written on your main website. At the bottom of your article in the signature you would put your website URL. Next bookmark your article, with url and description at the higher PR social bookmarking website and you would then get traffic back to your main website.
PageRank Display - Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar's PageRank™ display to tell you how Google assesses the importance of the page you're viewing. If you're interested in knowing which websites have a high Page Rank (PR) you might download Google's PageRank tool bar for your Web Based Browser to see the page rank of the websites you are visiting.
Some Top Bookmarking and Blogging Sites and their current Page Rank
Note: Don't be alarmed if your website Page Rank changes. Algorithms change and so a drop or increase in page rank really is only one factor in getting traffic to your website.
Google Page Rank 9 (PR9) | Google Page Rank 8 (PR8) |
http://www.facebook.com | http://www.technorati.com |
http://del.icio.us | http://www.myspace.com/ |
http://www.twitter.com | |
http://www.newsvine.com | |
http://www.orkut.com | |
http://www.furl.net | |
http://www.reddit.com | |
http://home.services.spaces.live.com/ | |
Google Page Rank 7 (PR7) | Google Page Rank 6 (PR6) |
http://www.digg.com | http://www.tagged.com |
http://www.squidoo.com | http://www.spurl.net |
http://360.yahoo.com | |
http://www.scribd.com |
Some free services that help you bookmark your site include:
http://www.onlywire.com - http://www.stumbleupon.com - http://socialize-it.com/
Social bookmarking is the latest trend of SEO, you can get the best Strongest backlinks from Social Bookmarking sites. You can bookmark your own websites and there are many services that will also help you bookmark your site for a small service fee. (Go to Google Search and type "social bookmarking website PR9" to find these services).
So now you know where to go but where do you get your article ideas?
Why not go to content providers that will pay you to write articles? This way you can see what other people are being paid for and duplicate their success.
Free IQ is an easy way to bookmark you website, get your ideas, products and services to your targeted audience.
With Free IQ you can:
* Upload, tag and share your content worldwide,
* Browse thousands of original ideas uploaded by community members
* Find, share and create ideas that connect with people
* Customize your experience with favorites and subscriptions
* Integrate Free IQ with your website using video embeds or APIs
Here is where you can go to sign up for free: http://freeiq.com/lognethosting8join
Here is how you can make money as an affliliate: http://freeiq.com/blognethosting8cashmachine
AC Associated Content is another directory where you can get paid for creative publishing ideas.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/90625/debbie_st_george.html
Sign up is free.
In conclusion, social bookmarking is a new way of promoting and getting traffic to your website. You can sign up for free and it cost a lot less than some forms of advertising.