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One of the most common pain points amongst those who run online communities is visibility. How do you make your community known and findable? Paid marketing can give new or established communities a much needed boost in exposure. Our friends at SiteWit know quite a lot about this area and provided us with a great four-part series on this subject.
Hooray you just built an awesome community! Now what? Well the answer is very simple: It’s time to start driving traffic to your site.
One of the best (and quickest) ways to drive traffic to your website is to build a paid search campaign on one of the big search engines such as Google or Bing & Yahoo!.
Paid search is a great way to drive traffic to your site because it will bring in visitors that are already looking for your specific kind of product and/or service. Best of all, it can happen right away! You could have people coming to your website just hours after it has gone live.
So how do I do start, you ask? Well that’s a bit more complicated. First you’ll have to open a Google Adwords or Bing Ads account. Then you’re going to build a campaign. Then you’re going to break up that campaign into ad groups. Then you’ll have to pick your keywords. Then you’ll have to build ads. Then you’ll have to determine how much you want to spend. Then you’ll have to…see where this is going? And here’s the kicker…starting the campaign is the easy part. After that you’ll have to consistently:
- Check your keyword performance by looking at CTRs, CPCs, ad position, and Quality Score to determine which ones need to stay in your list and which ones need the ax.
- Do your own manual a/b testing to determine which message in your ads is driving the best traffic.
- Look at your keyword bids DAILY to see how the competition has affected the bidding landscape and then determine what the right bid should be today to stay on that first page of search results.
In a nutshell, paid search is great but it is no easy task.
Luckily there are companies such as SiteWit that have made it easy to start a paid search marketing campaign with all the confidence and none of the know-how. Setting up a campaign through SiteWit is easy, can be done in about five minutes, and it won’t break the bank. They’ll take care of the technical stuff by performing:
- Keyword analysis
- Automated a/b testing
- Automated keyword bidding
- Landing page recommendations
- Campaign recommendations
- Quality score optimization
- And so much more!
Now that you know where to start and what tool to use, let’s start driving people to your website! Visit www.sitewit.com to learn how they can help you market your website with confidence.
(Image: Google Main Search, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from moneyblognewz's photostream)
This post originally appeared on the SiteWit blog and is part of a four article series on paid marketing for communities.
About SiteWit
SiteWit is a Do It Yourself (DIY) online marketing platform specifically designed for small and mid-sized businesses. With SiteWit you can get started with pay-per-click advertising through Google and Bing. Our solution fully automate SEM management and optimization to maximize budgets and drive new customers to your site.
