If you have a South Africa company, you should list yourself on The Business Directory. Newly upgraded and run by Search Engine Marketing Specialists, you are sure to get some targeted traffic from your listing. There are various packages available for listing including FREE listings, but take note that paid listing give you a string of benefits.

To compare packages, just visit www.thebusinessdirectory.co.za/compare.php.

The response has been positive so far with users getting quality referrals from The Business Directory.

Further, if you are looking to make some extra cash on the side, we are offering an affiliate program paying out 30% of paid listings to referrals that result in a sale. Please note that this is currently somewhat of a manual process and that you should please contact us on info@thebusinessdirectory.co.za if you are interested in signing up.

If you want results, it’s time to jump on this bandwagon, because 2009 will be a big year for online video and what it can bring you. There are various techniques in optimising your video content. It’s important to categorise your video content correctly, whether by tagging, titles or keywords and even transcriptions. There are numerous ways to ensure that your video content is indexed correctly and it can possibly bring a huge amount of traffic to your website. Talk to us to find out more!

The other side of the coin in online marketing is ‘online marketing real estate’. Online marketing companies are constantly looking to find high traffic websites on which they can market their clients’ products and services. Further, if you have a large database of clients/users that have opted in to receive further information, all the better.

So what’s important to take into consideration when looking for advertisers?

Niche

Is the topic/theme of your website conducive to advertising? Do you have a sufficient sized community that regularly visits the website? It’s important to note that if you’ve chosen a popular niche that your website is clearly a cut above the rest in terms of relevance and being up to date. Search engines will award your with traffic if they realise that you’re providing your users with relevant content and that in turns bring traffic which brings me to my next point.

Traffic

Targeted traffic is very important. If you can show potential advertisers that you’re receiving a big load of relevant traffic each month in a specific niche, you have feet to stand on.

Know your users

You’re flying blind if you don’t know who’s using your website. First and foremost ensure that you have proper stats installed (try Google Analytics to start with). Secondly, try and capture some of your market via user registrations and newsletter subscriptions, as that will enable you to better profile your website users. Profile your users according to their preferences as well as age, gender, location and more. Try and find a balance between being overbearing and something your users will feel comfortable in sharing. If you can present a breakdown of your profiles and number of users within those profiles it will help agencies match potential advertisers with your website.

Ensure you can handle ads

Ensure that your website layout has dedicated areas for advertising. Don’t overdo it of course as clutter will cause your users to go blind to your ads. Do you have ad serving software in place? There are small and large scale solutions for serving ads. The simplest is Adsense of course, but if you really want to manage it properly a proper ad serving platform is required. Something like DoubleClick can be of great use and advertisers look out for credible ad serving solutions as part of their decision making processes. These ad serving platforms also provide you with great analytics which you can provide to potential advertisers.

Channels

Your website is not your only media channel, if you have a large subscriber database you can open up revenue opportunities by selling ad space in your newsletters as well. Further you can segment the different sections on your website as high target niches for advertising to better serve advertisers. Develop your channels over time and monetise accordingly!

Talk to potential advertisers

Once you have everything sorted on your website, start targeting potential advertisers. Advertising Agencies are generally a good bet, but online marketing agencies even better as they generally handle online media buying for their clients. Also prepare to pay commissions to agencies that handle their client accounts. Generally they would negotiate a cost per click or per 1000 impressions for placing ads on your website.

It’s not always easy to build up such a successful platform, but it can surely be lucrative once you get to that stage.

Talk to PERONii Solutions if you’re interested in a consulting session on monetising your website or if you’re in need of online marketing specialists to look at promoting your products and services

With many companies heaving under global economic pressure, it’s important to revise your marketing strategies to reach your markets by the more affordable and measurable means of online marketing.

Online marketing has always been lower priority for many large corporates in their marketing campaigns, but this is set to change as radio, print and television advertising budgets dwindle.

By employing various online media like search, pay per click, email and social networks you can spread out your budgets effectively and with real time stats, executives and marketing managers can quickly change direction to focus on the avenues  that deliver high returns.

PERONii assists companies in developing sound online marketing strategies and to implement these strategies effectively. Our experience in online marketing allows us to make recommendations up front to maximise the efficiency of your online marketing spend. Comprehensive reporting also provide the means for quick decision making by our clients.

We have never recommended that companies entirely forfeit traditional marketing spend for online marketing, but in these times we would recommend at least 30-40% spend of marketing budgets online. In the UK the current figure hovers just under 20% of total marketing budgets being spent online. It’s less than 1% behind press and TV advertising and is said to surpass these within the next year or two.

If you’d like to find out what online marketing can do for your company, kindly fill out a free quote request form.

PERONii has recently launched The Business Directory.

www.thebusinessdirectory.co.za

What is it?

The Business Directory is a directory listing website, where any South African business can list, either for free, or with a paid membership which allows for many more features.

The features of paid membership includes (not all, but here are some of them):

• Ability to upload your logo

• Ability to upload product images

• Ability to feature banner ads (on rotational basis)

• Ability to add documentation (e.g. order forms for download etc)

• Ability to receive emails directly from the website

What does it benefit us as a company to list?

The Business Directory is run by internet marketing specialists, so you get all the benefits of years worth of experience in online marketing. Our policy is also to re-invest part of paid membership listing fees into online advertising for the website, which will bring great exposure for everyone.

We will also assist you in selecting (or us creating) the right category and making your listing active.

If you don’t have a banner ad, we can create one for you at an additional cost of R300 per banner ex VAT (or R400 for two banners). You can use this banner on other websites as you like too as we’ll make it reasonably generic to suit any website. Remember you don’t need a banner ad to list as premium member, it’s just added benefit and exposure.

How do I register?

Just click the following link to register:
http://www.thebusinessdirectory.co.za/members/user_register_account.php

After you have registered, you will receive an email with a link you need to click to validate your email address.

Once you have done this, you can log in and click on ‘submit listing’. Remember your listing won’t show until it’s approved by an administrator.

Something relatively new on the market is Pay-Per-Play Audio Ads. The concept is simple, you embed some code on your web page and a short audio ad automatically plays, but content targetted. My first impression was that it could ad some value, allthough I don’t necessarily like the idea that users don’t have control whether to hear it or not. That, in the end will decide whether there will be good uptake on Pay-Per-Play Audio Ads.

Set for launch in February 2008 it’s going to be interesting reporting back on this new channel of online advertising. Whether the content is fit for international consumption will also be interesting, but so far more than 12,000 people have signed up with over 8 million websites. It’s also run with an affiliate program, so you stand to generate more income from your downline as well.

To check it out, visit the  Pay-Per-Play Audio Ads website.

I’ll be reporting back on my experiences…