A recent product launch on this topic got me intrigued and I started searching. What came out was just quite surprising.

And you will find that there is a whole lot of world out there. Outside realms of organic or paid traffic from search engines or social sites or other web places.

And that the people are making good money with this kind of traffic. silently and effectively.

Before you fully understand the concept of PPV marketing let us refresh the concept of adware.

Do not worry. Dots would be connected very soon.

Adware, or advertising-supported software, is any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertisements to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used. [Wikipedia]

Advertising functions are integrated into or bundled with the software, which is often designed to note what Internet sites the user visits and to present advertising pertinent to the types of goods or services featured there. Adware is usually seen by the developer as a way to recover development costs, and in some cases it may allow the software to be provided to the user free of charge or at a reduced price.

Some adwares aer viruses and harmful for computer but many other are genuine and do not do more than annoying pop ups.

Suppose  you type a url in the address box or tried to perform a google search, and a new, seemingly random browser window opens up over your intended result. That is adware.

PPV marketing is based on the platform of Adware.

How does PPV Marketing Work?

Suppose you are an advertiser with a particular target audience.  You sign up with an adware company  that has built adwares which your target audience might use. You signup and choose the keywords and  user of a computer affected with program performs a search on that term on that computer, the user will get their normal search results, but, the adware causes their computer to open a browser on top of their search results with their ad.

This is one method of doing it.

In addition, the advertisers can also bid on URLs. This causes the adware to open their ad or page in a browser window when the user of an infected computer types a certain url into the address bar.

Cool!!

One of the benefits of PPV marketing is that  keywords or urls are much cheaper to bid on compared to adwords.

Trafficvance.com, mediatraffic.com, and zango.com are the major sites dealing in this kind of marketing. When I visited Zango.com asks you to mail. Strange! Nothing else is there.

Some people have had extraordinary success with PPV marketing.

I am not sure if I would like to try this. I personally do not like the pop ups. They have annoyed me a lot in the beginning when I had a new computer and I was fool enough to download these kind of stuffs.

But if they say it is effective, it must be.

Some one with an experience might throw some light on this issue.

Do What Brings Result, Not What You Like

For almost five years I had been using just article marketing for promotion and traffic generation for my website.

It was easy to do  and kind of fun.

I liked it and stuck to it.

Did not try other things with the depth they should be.

Things have quite evolved since I started and new technologies have ushered in a whole new possibilities.

But in want of lerarning I kept these things at bay.

Not a good thing to do.

To maximize my promotional results I should have made appropriate use of all media.

I have decided to move forward and make serious use of other form of marketing that includes forums, blog comments, social media, press release, video marketing, search engine marketing and RSS promotion. Next phase is inclusion of paid advertising.

If you want to learn from my mistake, just remember this – Do not get wedded to one or two forms of advertising/marketing.

Do not fall in love with the process. Keep your eyes at maximizing your efforts.

Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. So is other one. Using them collectively would bring maximum results.

How you use them is up to you. You might want to outsource few of them or do everything yourself.

Ifor the moment am doing everything by myself. I might want to outsource few things when I move to paid advertising as well.

Arfe you too in love with some form of marketing that makes you stick with it. How do you manage your marketing?

Online marketing spending has been predicted to rise in 2010.

Geoff Ramsey, CEO and cofounder of eMarketer has predicted that online marketing spending would increase by 9%.

This however would be done by readjusting the budget rather than increasing it.

That means money would be pulled out from traditional media outlet where companies spend money  and pumped into digital world.

In a separate study,  Forrester Research has oncluded that 59% of US marketers plan to increase their budgets for digital by pulling funds from traditional outlets.

The author explains this is happening because internet has wider reach and does not cause as much wastage as traditional media.

This is a good news.

This means internet is growing in spite of recession. It might be growing at the cost of other media but that was bound to happen one day.

As for as internet market is concerned it has just started to swell.

A lot more is to come.

What do you think?

A yet to be published new study has confirmed that even this incidental exposure to advertising may have a positive effect on consumer attitudes. The study would be published by Journal of Consumer Research.

The study has revised repeated views of web-based banner ads.

The study says

“Regardless of measured click-through rates, banner ads may still create a favorable attitude toward the ad due to repeated exposure.”

The repeated content leads to familiarity which is a good thing in  business.

What does this mean

It means we can not just abandon banners by saying that they do not work.  Instead banners should be strategically used t build the familiarity about your business, a kind of subtle brnd building.

So if you had been thinking of taking of your banner campaigns, think again about the long term benefit

As a marketer we are aware of using similar keywords for advertising our products because different people have different associations.

In a startling research, researchers at the University of Warwick has found that people have different view of what can be called similar and the world can be divided into two separate groups when it comes to choosing similar things.

This behaviour pattern is very consistent and specific in both kinds of people.

The research says

People differ radically in their perceptions of similarity. Whereas some people base their similarity judgments on physical features that looked alike, others based their judgments on more theme based relations. For instance, some people thought a bee is more similar to a butterfly, whereas others thought a bee is more similar to honey.

Two kind of behavior pattrens emerge

• Half of people associate similarity to the physical features. For example cake and cookie.
• Another half base their judgment on the theme rather than physical features. For example cake and birthday.

Dr Zachary, the man behind the research further says

The phenomenon we have studied has many potential applications – a clever supermarket might, for instance, sell up to twice as much of one type of coffee by placing it both with other coffees and also with biscuits.

He was clever enough to point that this would boost web advertising too.

However this could have even more impact on some forms of web based advertising such as Google AdWords.

How do you profit from it.

This is a great piece of discovery for PPC marketers. Not only you can choose your keywords based on physical features as we used to do but also we can target our audience by choosing theme based keywords.

This could even mean building different headlines for your campaigns altogether. One based on physical features and other one on theme based association.

But you can also choose to create two different set of articles, salesletter for two halves of the world. That would make them more specific and more targeted.

It is almost like doubling your audience and thus double the profits.

We recently talked about word of mouth recommendations and their effect on your business. You can aid people to spread their recommendations. People are always ready to recommend to others if they find your product or service of value.

You can aid in and encourage people by

• Providing a channel of communication
• Give Call For Action
• By encouraging them by some kind of incentive

Providing A Channel Of Communication

Tell a friend does this beautifully. If you have one on your website when your customer has just made a purchase, presenting him or her with option of tellling a friend would increase chances of your website getting recommended.

A forum and/or a blog on your website is another method where you provide platform to your customers or prospects to voice their opinion and get feedback.

While positive feedback would have its own sweet effect, you also get a chance to address the issues affecting your reputation.

Call For Action

Ask your customers to give you feedback and refer yourself to their friends if they like your service or product. You can make this arrangements just after the purchase have been made or in follow up letters that you would be sending them.

A majority of people do response to call for action.

Provide Incentives

Incentives always attract people. You can use this habit to your benefit. You can offer special bonus, discount offer or limited time offers to persons who refer you to a fixed number of people such as 5 or 10.

If you have ever subscribed to Reader Digest, you would remember a letter that would ask you to fill addresses of 15 people and they would send you magazine on discount.

In simple terms they are generating referrals.

Refrrals provide you with hot prospects who are already conditioned by recommender’s influence.

Get them.

In my early childhood I used to live in Thali- a small village in Hoshiarpur, Punjab. The village was so small that you could count number of people living there. Everybody knew everybody. There were fixed job profiles of villagers. You knew who to call. The downside was that you had to put up with whatever was available because there were no choices.

I still remember the plumber whose services were so poor that nobody liked him. But he was plumber. His family had been doing this for generations. There was no one else for that job. That man would always come late, do his work half heartedly and never bother to check post-job whether it was working fine.

Competition was a word that wasa not heard by anyone. Marketing was not required.

Few years later we chose to move to a small town caller Tarapur.

Here, the things were different.

You could make choices whom to call for the job. There were always more than one person for the specific job.

So we faced what can be called “The Problem of Choice”.

Every time we wanted something to be done, we would knock our neighbours’ door and ask for advice.

Whom to call?

Mr. Mehta, our neighbour was a courteous man who had been living there for ages and knew everything about that time.

He always knew whom to call.

That was the first word of mouth publicity that I had witnessed. It worked fine because competition was not very intense and expectation of people were not high.

Even after I moved to Delhi, where I live presently, we had to rely on word of mouth for our needs. Because of plethora of everything, my questions were of new kind.

Who is the best person to do the job?

What is th best place to eat out?

And so on……?

I was asking for the best available choice?

Always followed what others advised.

Word of mouth recommendation has an instantaneous and almost permanent effect.

It is hailed as best kind of advertising you can use and leverage.

How to get Word of Mouth publicity for your business?

Excel and expose.

You need to get across people as someone who is very good in his work. Plus more and more people need to know you before they can recommend.

How to achieve that.

Make your business outstanding. Make your website interface, sales process and after sales customer friendly and your customer would surely talk to many others.

Remember! In this era of technology the Word of Mouth does not simply mean that two person should meet and talk.

It is more like communication which can be by

• Telephone
• Email
• Messanger
• SMS

And any other media you can think of.

People may talk less but communication potential is high.

You can build a mass wave of recommendation if you work towards that.

Otherwise people would definitely go to your competition.

Im sure you do not want that to happen.

It is important to plan your advertising campaign well in advance. Planning most involve every stage that your campaign needs.In my opinion, your online advertising must go through following steps:
Setting objectives:

Before you plan and expand your compaign further, you must answer ask question in writing, what do I want to achieve from this compaign?

Your objective might be making an- amount or to acquire- number of subscribers.

The objective should be clear and measurable, so that you can compare it with your achievement.

Target Market:

Whom is this ad intended for Define what segment of market you would be targeting.

For example: Is your product for Mom at Homes or Office goers or so on?

You may include multiple segments but you must know how many segments you are targeting and what would be your approach for each segment.

Look For Places:

What are the places that your target market is visiting online, what are the possible advertising awareness on these places.

You can make a list and then select tater on where you want to put your money on?

Budget:

What would be your budget allocated for the compaign?

Ad Designing:

What kind of ad medias would you be using and how you are going to approach creation of ads.

If you are outsourcing then you would have to look for companies/ persons whom you would.

Rest of the points are execution of advertising and are self explanatory

Send Ad to Publisher:

Ha! How Obvious.

Track responses:

You must place measures to track the results of your campaign. There are plenty of services available that would help you with this.

Analyze:

Analyze what is working and analyze what is not working. Is everything happening as you wanted. If not then you should find the solution for non performing parts of your campaign.

Review

Monitoring is not one time task. It requires regular review and re-review.

Improvise:

Based on your reviews, ad needs to be improvised.

When you advertise, it is good to be specific. The usage like best, quickest, greatest while it may sound good to your ears does not leave much impression on the listeners mind.

On the contrary it suggests a vague expression. The ad world is a hyped and exaggerated world. Everybody understands that. The readers of your advertisement would make their own discounts when they read your advertisements.

People would allow you certain leverage when you are advertising and in response they would adjust their responses after taking out your enthusiasm and hype from the ad.

Do not we do that.

So saying best in quality will not put the message across.

These superlatives worked earlier when advertising was on small scale and claims were not perceived as false. Yes! You can still make false claims and get away with it but no body is going to believe your statements like ‘we are the best’ until you genuinely are perceived that way.

It is time to be specific. It is time to study your strong points and highlight them.

Just see the difference between two kinds of claims.

We are the best autoresponders that have greatest email delivery rate.

Autoresponder with unmatched delivery rate of 96.4%.

It is obvious which leaves a lasting impact.

Moreover, people want to be more aware of the facts. They would like to know numbers instead of generalized claims.

You need to give people what they want.

The ad with specific facts would always be a clear winner over the one which is not.

Advertisements are made to create awareness, spread information about the products or to bring more people to that product. But the problem with advertisement is that it can be ignored.

The advertisement is read only by interested people who follow their own interests when it comes to viewing or reading.
What you have will interest certain people only, and for certain reasons.

These are the people whom your advertisement should focus on. You should target and care these people only. Your ad should be created for these people only.

It could be very tempting to address masses. You think that you would get attention of a larger number of people.

But that is what you think.

People read only what they like or have interest in. People watch only what they want. People are very choosy when it comes to listening.

Why would they pay attention to an advertisement among plethora of ads until it gets their interest.

An article on beard style would not be read by most of the women. If your ad does not offer relevant interest for a person he would not read it.

We all are pressed for time. People are hurried. The average person has too many things to focus his attention upon.

People do not read the stuff they buy because they do not have time to that.

But there is another side. People would read if it interest them People want to benefited. They want economy, comfort, clothing, love security and all good things in life.

As a marketer you need to target those groups in your niche.

Here comes the importance of multiple advertisements. Because people are different and are stimulated by different kinds of approaches, sending multiple versions of ad would bring more results than a single one.

“Online Business From Home” may attract few people. So is the case with “Quit Your Job and Be Wealthy At Home”. Different ads stimulate different people. Having multiple ads increases your reach.

Do not make general ads that try to cater to all.

Instead make your ads focusing on various groups.

You would get higher and better responses.