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• First, make a list of the URLs of the award sites you are interested
in.
• Understand the submission form and guidelines. Review a number
of forms to determine the information commonly requested.
• To save time, develop a document with the answers to the various
questions from which you can copy and paste into the different
submission forms.
• Submission forms capture the following types of information:
– URL
– Title of your site
– Contact person (name, e-mail, phone, address)
– Owner of the site
• Submission guidelines tell you what types of sites can be submitted.
(Some awards do not accept personal pages; others do
not include commercial sites.) The submission guidelines also
tell you what meets the definition of “cool” or “new” and what
doesn’t.
• Some award sites require that you display their award icon on
your site. Posting an award on your site can provide a number
of positive results—including enhanced credibility.
What’s Hot and What’s Not in the Name of Cool
Most of the award sites provide their selection criteria. Some base their
selection on valuable content; others look for innovative and unique capabilities.
Sites vary on what they consider “hot” or “cool,” but they are
fairly consistent on what doesn’t make the grade, as summarized next.
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What’s Hot What’s Not
Awesome graphics Single-page sites
Great, original content Single-product promotion
Broad appeal Offensive language or graphics
Fun features Lengthy download time
Posting Your Awards on Your Site
If you have managed to collect a few awards for your Web site, you
want to display them. After all, any award is a good award, and the
site that granted you one expects you to display it in return for the
recognition. Posting the awards on your home page might not be the
best idea, though. For one thing, the additional graphics that will have
to be downloaded will slow the load time for your home page. Second,
by posting the awards on your home page, you are placing links
leading out of your site on the first page. Thus, you are giving people
the opportunity to leave your site before they have even had a chance
to explore it. Where should you post your well-deserved awards, then?
Simply create an awards section on your Web site. Here, you can list
all of your awards without adversely affecting the load time of your
home page or losing traffic.
Becoming the Host of Your Own Awards Gala
You can also create your own awards program to draw traffic to your
site; however, this requires a considerable amount of work to maintain.
The benefits of having your own award program include having links
back to your site from the awards placed on winners’ sites, which is
important for search engine placement because of link popularity. Because
you control the text around the link back to your site, make sure
you include your most important keywords to enhance your link relevancy
score to further improve your search engine ranking. There are
also great opportunities for permission (“Click here to be notified via
e-mail when we have a new award winner”) and viral marketing (“Tell
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304 101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site
a friend about this award—Click here”). In addition, having your own
awards program provides you with “bragging rights” and the opportunity
for press releases to announce your awards, which gain exposure
for your Web site and increase traffic. You need to work at it daily or
weekly, so you must be committed to it. Be sure there is a benefit from a
marketing perspective before you design and develop your own awards
program. You must also be prepared to conduct your own searches to
find sites worthy of your award if the quality of sites being submitted to
you is not up to your standard.
There are a number of steps involved in getting your awards program
up and running:
• Develop the criteria to use in your site selection.
• Develop several Web pages related to the award (information
on selection criteria, submission forms, today’s or this week’s
award winner, past award recipients page, etc.) in order to promote
the award. (Be sure that you stipulate whether you are
looking for submissions from commercial sites or personal pages
and what criteria will be used in judging submissions.)
• Develop your award icon. Have this icon link back to your site.
The award distinguishes the winner; thus, the link might be displayed
prominently on its site. This is a great traffic builder.
• Finally, announce the award and market, market, market.
Internet Resources for Chapter 19
I have included a few resources for you to check out about winning
awards and being designated a cool or hot site. For additional resources
on a variety of topics, visit the Resources section of my Web site at
http://www.susansweeney.com/resources.html. There you will find additional
tips, tools, and techniques.
Award Sites
http://www.awardsites.com
Free guide to promoting, marketing, or just browsing some of the best
sites on the Internet that offer a diverse range of information, services,
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or products—including many with excellent Web site award or review
programs.
Jayde.com
http://www.jayde.com/goldlnks.html
Awards the Gold Diamond Award to sites with great style, design, and
content. Jayde.com also has an award for commercial sites.
Webby Awards
http://www.webbyawards.com
The Webby Awards have been embraced by the online community as
the leading creative honors for digital media. The awards recognize the
most creative and innovative Web sites of the year and the talented
editorial, technical, and design teams behind them.
WebAwards
http://www.webaward.org
Since 1997, the annual WebAward for Web site development has been
the premier awards event where Web sites are recognized, competing
head to head with other sites within their industry and against an overall
standard of excellence.
The AXIEM AWARDS
http://www.axiemawards.com
The AXIEM AWARDS is an international awards program created to
honor those who produce the best in all forms of electronic media.
Hot Sites/Cool Sites
100 Hot Web Sites
http://www.100hot.com
Directory of Web sites based on Web traffic and organized by category.
Cool Site of the Day
http://www.coolsiteoftheday.com
Cool Site of the Day is a wildly popular Internet award site that features
interesting, provocative, and irreverent Web sites from around the world.
CoolStop
http://www.coolstop.com
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The Best of the Cool Award consistently recognizes outstanding sites in
terms of design, originality, and content.
JimWorld Way Cool Hot Site Award
http://jimworld.com/hotpg.html
From this site you can visit some of the coolest, most interesting hot
sites on the Web. These sites are selected by a blue ribbon panel of
one—Jim. The sites here are truly special. Jim receives about 500 submissions
every week; that’s about 2,000 per month. Out of that he usually
finds only one winner. Visit a few of these sites. It’s worth the time.
USA Today Hot Sites
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/ch.htm
USA Today scours the Web for sites that are hot, new, and notable. Visit
their daily list to find some of the best sites the Web has to offer. They
look for sites that stretch the design envelope and show where the Web
is headed—sites that offer something unusual or unexpected, or just
plain useful.
Virtual Reference Meta-Index of Award Sites
http://www.refdesk.com/textcool.html
A listing of sites that host Site of the Day, Hot Sites, and so on.
Web Pages That Suck
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com
Keep your site from being nominated to this awards site, and you are
probably doing well. However, you can learn much here about how to
properly design your site from a marketing perspective.
World Best Websites
http://www.worldbestwebsites.com
World Best Website Awards are granted to exemplary Web sites that are
pursuing “best practices” in Web site design and Internet communications.
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20
Productive Online Advertising
The world of banner advertising is changing rapidly. Several years ago
banner advertising was in vogue, visitors were clicking through, good
banner space was hard to find, and prices were rising. What a difference
a day makes! The last several years have seen banner advertising
prices decline significantly. Quality space is not difficult to obtain, and
click-through rates are on the decline dramatically. Banner advertising
is being used primarily to meet branding objectives.
Despite all the doom and gloom and bad press, however, banner ads
can still be an effective advertising medium if the banner ad is properly
developed and placed on a well-chosen site. We are starting to see a
shift toward ads using rich media. Advertising on-line provides visibility—
just as offline advertising does. You must develop a banner advertising
strategy that works with your product, your marketing objectives,
and your budget.
Advertising in the search engines is an important related topic. This
topic is covered in Chapter 8.
In this chapter, we cover:
• Your online advertising strategy
• Advertising opportunities on the Web
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308 101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site
• Banner ad design and impact on click-throughs
• Banner ad sizes and locations
• Placing classifieds
• Tips to creating dynamite banner ads that work
• The cost of advertising on-line
• Measuring ad effectiveness
• Banner ad exchange networks
• Using an online advertising agency
• Sources of Internet advertising information.
Expanding Your Exposure through Internet Advertising
Today, Internet advertising is being recognized in the advertising budgets
of businesses around the globe. Banner ads are a way to create
awareness of your Web site and increase the traffic to it. Banners are
placed on the sites that your target market is likely to frequent, thus
encouraging this market to click through and visit you!
The Internet offers many different advertising spaces. Banner ads
can be placed on search engines, content sites, advertising sites, and
online magazines. The choice of where your ad is displayed is based on
the objectives you wish to achieve with your online advertising strategy.
There are a number of advantages to online advertising:
• The response from these ads can easily be measured within one
day through Web traffic analysis.
• The amount of information that can be delivered, if your Web site
is visited, far surpasses that of a traditional advertising campaign.
• The cost of developing and running an online advertising campaign
is much less than using traditional media.
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Productive Online Advertising 309
Traditionally, advertising used to be handled by a public relations
(PR) firm or advertising company that would come up with your marketing
concept. As clients, businesses would review and approve (usually
after several attempts) the concepts before they were ever released
to the public eye. The PR or advertising firms would be responsible
for developing TV, radio, and print ads for the businesses. They would
come up with the media-buy strategy after reviewing appropriate publications,
editorial calendars, pricing, and the discounts that they would
receive for multiple placements. The ads were then gradually released
over the period of the campaign and finally were viewed by the public.
At the end of the campaign, the PR or advertising company would
evaluate the success of the marketing campaign. This is very easy if the
objective of the campaign was to achieve X number of sales, but it is
much more difficult if the goal of your campaign was to generate brand
awareness.
Today, online banner ads are developed in much less time and are
placed on Web sites quickly. Web traffic analysis software can tell you
the next day if the banner ad is working or not by tracking the number
of visitors who clicked through and visited your site through the ad.
This provides you with the opportunity to change the site on which you
are advertising or to change the banner ad to see if it attracts a greater
audience.
Nielsen Net Ratings (http://www.nielsen-netratings.com—Figure
20.1) offers great up-to-date resources to find out who is doing the
most online advertising. You can check this resource to find the top ten
banners displayed on the Internet each week and the top ten advertisers
on-line.
Maximize Advertising with Your Objectives in Mind
When developing your advertising strategy, start with the objectives of
your advertising campaign. The most common objectives for an online
advertising campaign include:
• Building brand awareness
• Increasing Web site traffic
• Generating leads and sales.
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310 101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site
You have a number of choices to make, such as what type of advertising
to use and where to advertise. These decisions should be based on
your objectives. If your objective is to increase overall brand recognition,
a nicely designed banner ad on several of the high-traffic search
engines would be effective. If you would like to develop leads and find
new clients, then a more targeted approach should be taken, such as
placing a banner ad on a high-traffic Web site that is frequented by your
target market.
When deciding how to proceed with your advertising strategy, consider
how many people you want to reach. Do you want a high-quality
response from a small number of much targeted people, or do you want
to reach a mass audience of grand proportions?
Think about the people you are targeting. If you sell dentistry supplies
to dental practices, then you want to target dentists and hygienists.
It would not make much sense to put an ad on Yahoo! when you could
advertise on a site about new medical discoveries in dentistry.
Always keep your budget in mind when you are devising your online
advertising strategy. There are many ways to stretch your advertising
dollar. If you have the time, you can find promising sites to trade ban-
Figure 20.1. Neilsen Net Ratings provides you with continuously updated
statistics on who is doing the most advertising on the Internet. The site also
provides you with interesting information and popular banner ads.
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Productive Online Advertising 311
ners. You can also participate in banner exchange programs, which are
set up by a third party, and your banner is displayed randomly on other
banner exchange participants’ pages.
Online Advertising Terminology
Banner Ads
Banner ads are small advertisements that are placed on a Web site. Companies
usually develop their banner ads, find sites for placement, and
then either purchase or trade banner space.
Click-Throughs
When a viewer clicks on a banner ad with the mouse and goes to the site
advertised, it is called a “click-through.” Sometimes banner advertising
prices are determined by the number of click-throughs.
Hits
Hits to a site are the number of times that another computer has accessed
that site (or a file in a site). This does not mean that if your site
has 1,000 hits, 1,000 people have visited it. If your home page has a
number of graphic files on it, this number could be misleading. A hit is
counted when the home page main file is accessed, but a hit is also
counted for every graphic file that loads along with the home page. So if
a person visits six pages on a site and each page has five graphics, at
least 30 hits would be generated.
Impressions or Page Views
When a banner ad is viewed, it is called an impression. Banner advertising
prices are often calculated by impressions. If a person visits a page
six times, this generates six impressions.