If you want to start a home based business, you will likely need to start devising a strategy for bringing your products or services to market. The web has changed everything from the way we order takeout to the way we pick our partners. Arguably the most prominent and equitable use of the web would be how we transact and do business over the web. Believe it or not, by reading this, you are choosing to transact with me. You might see this page on my site, or that someone linked to my article and re-tweeted it, and you may never decide to buy anything from me, but the fact remains that you are to an extent, doing business with me. Viewership, readership, and distribution of this content means I end up with more dollar at the end of the day. This leads me to my next point. SEO is the act of building links, adding content, and becoming a resource on the web for any given topic or keyword you want to rank well for. Here I am going to compare SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and how they both benefit you now as well as in the long run.
Explanation of SEO: SEO which is short for Search Engine Optimization is the act of bringing your website to the tops of the results pages in search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. There are a number of factors that go into this. Many people think SEO is internet magic or the like and can be conquered in only a short period of time. Ranking a site well requires that other websites link back to you and this takes time. If your link profile is built too quickly or unnaturally, your site may be penalized by the engines, thus prolonging the sweet results of page one rankings. If you do solid research and know your competition and what they are doing to rank well, then your chances of succeeding drastically increase. SEO can cost you close to nothing if you do it yourself, and the results can be amazing because once you get to the top of the engines, you’ll seldom lose your traction unless you do something like abandon your site, completely stop building links, or get greedy and start spamming the web to build more links the wrong way.
How your PPC results will change your life: it won’t. But a well devised PPC strategy can make your life a ton easier because you don’t have to wait for it. I can literally start at the top of the hour, purchase a domain, download a Wordpress template to my host with a simple contact form, use some content from one of my blog posts or articles, publish, create a list of keywords for Google Adwords, launch my campaign, and have more traffic than I can handle within a couple of hours of the site being born. There are two types of business owners: ones that have money or ones that have time. Obviously, if I needs to make sales and generate traffic for my business today, the latter of these two scenarios would benefit me the greatest. There are unforeseen challenges awaiting marketers who choose this path. You run the risk of spending a couple hundred dollars in one day without getting the results you need, if you achieve good ad positions for a specific keyword that is working, your competitors could outbid you and have a direct impact on your advertising costs for the worse.
At the end of the day, both of these marketing strategies are winners and you should rely at some point on using both. It depends solely on personal tastes and budgetary demands associated with the business. There will be more on the subject as volumes have been written on each topic. For now, it seems we have a draw and that most all businesses need both.
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