Free Advertising From Microsoft
I'd like to think that Lucrative Lumens subscribers benefit from my web experience but sometimes I wonder. I wrote what I thought was a fantasitic (in terms of the potential value of the information) newsletter and in less than 4 hours had two unsubscribes—a new record!
I'd like to think my work is not in vain. Last week, I worked over 80 hours, much of which was spent online, and with that comes awareness of things many are not aware of. A couple weeks ago I sent a newsletter about local business listings. I hope you took it to heart, following those steps could easily double your business with less than one day's work. I'm sorry to say that I myself hadn't claimed my local listing on Yahoo! (I tried but was rebuffed and relegated it to the backburner for several months).
A few nights ago I decided to remedy that oversight. You can see what I searched and what I was surprised to find in the screenshot below.
Microsoft, which owns Bing, and shares search advertising traffic with Yahoo!, is offering up to $300 in free advertising to entitites that begin advertising on their site soon (before the end of June if I remember correctly). I assure you I am going to take them up on this offer within a week for websites that I market:
And yes, those are self-serving links but that is the undeniable benefit of authoring your own content :)Search engine advertising is quite straight-forward, you advertise on phrases. If you are a wedding photographer you enter the keywords Wedding Photographers. Assuming it is set up like AdWords (Google) you might want to start with the phrase in quotes and see how much traffic you get. You can then modify to a less specific type of match if your traffic is low. I am administering a Google Adwords account for Greg based on the terms "architectural photographer." It is great because your ad shows up to people when they are looking for a service you provide: One of my favorite techniques is to use the names of my competitors as triggering keywords.
While I haven't yet used Microsoft/Yahoo!/Bing advertising, a client of mine has and traffic was low, which means the bids are cheaper and since it is free you really have nothing to lose, except potential business. With AdWords you don't even need a website but I'm not sure about this. To be clear, these programs can seem simple and at the same time be incredibly complex but why not give it a shot? I am a certified AdWords agency, and I take clients who want to advetise online and make sure it is set up ideally. While I'd be happy to do that for you (in AdWords, Bing, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.), there is nothing to stop a motivated person from doing it themselves; truth be told, I wish more of my clients were willing to handle some of this themselves as they have much better insight into the specifics of their business than I ever will.
Adam-at-BusinessforPhotographers-dot-com
Proprietor of Adam Infinitum
