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Thursday, February 03, 2005
Ng: Creating your own ads online
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
JUST GOOGLE IT. One of the recent additions to the English vocabulary is the word google. If I remember right, this originally was a word that meant 1 followed by 99 zeroes, which really means a huge number bordering on infinity.
But for the last three years, it has meant something else—finding something in the Internet. Even Hollywood movies have lines like, “Let’s google it,” which essentially means let’s look for it in the Web.
Google is now probably the most popular search engine in the Web, but what makes money for the company (it is now valued at $52 billion as of this writing) is the money it makes from advertising.
One of the reasons why it is making so much money is not the search engine, but the technology that allows millions of small websites to carry google advertisements (if you surf a lot, you will see many other news or personal websites carrying ads for google), as well as advertise in them.
I will try to write simply on how you can do this and point you to the website if you are interested.
If you have a personal website, one of the things you should do is visit http://adwords.google.com. You can advertise there by just clicking on the site and following the instructions without any sales
people trying to sell you more.
Here, you create your own advertisements, specify your budget (even a few dollars will do!), and give a bid on how much you would be willing to pay if somebody clicked on your ad. It forces you to think through certain words, and get a better understanding of what kind of people you really want to visit your site.
If, for instance, one of the things you want is to have your ad come out when the person is going to Google to look for “Nokia 6530 Cellphone” (assuming you are a website that sells mobile phones), then you can specify that, and also how much you are willing to pay if the person should click and go to your site.
Let us say there are two other advertisers who specified that as well. Your bid was 15 cents, the second one bid 24 cents, and the third bid 10 cents.
In the hierarchy, the person bidding 24 cents will come first. You will come second, and the person bidding 10 cents will come third. But the great thing is you pay only one cent more than the next lower bidder. So although you specified 15 cents, if somebody should click your ad, you actually need to pay only 11 cents.
It encourages people to bid more so that they will be on top, knowing that if not many people bid on that or bid low, they will still end up paying low.
For the last few months, I have been working on my web log (blog) or personal website, where I also post my articles, like this one. So I have been experimenting also on advertising my site.
In the last three months, I have probably paid Google a few dollars a month, but I can boast that I am also an advertiser in Google! But the most important thing, I think, is that if you want to understand more about how the Internet works, and how to market and advertise in the Web, your first stop should be Google. After that, you will automatically get a great lesson on how the Internet really works, and how to better understand how to get traffic for your website.
(www.bizdrivenlife.net)
(February 3, 2005 issue)
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