In order to perform effective internet advertising, you first need to understand your target market. It doesn’t matter what business you are in or what products/services you offer. If you are unable to learn what your potential customers are looking for, you might as well not even waste the money on advertising. So spend some time researching your target market until you have their wants and needs crystal clear in your mind.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. They probably receive pages and pages of spam every day. If you are sending out email advertisements, you need to figure out a way to distinguish yourself from the rest of the hype. One easy way to do this is to not be “hypey” yourself. Create and ad that is informational and problem-solving, rather than one that is all about buy, buy, buy.

The headline of your ad, whether it’s a banner, a PPC ad or an email ad, is extremely important. Your audience will make a decision on whether they want to continue or not based on your headline so it must be compelling. Ask a controversial question or provide some shocking information. Those work well. But it should all tie into the benefits your audience will receive from your products/services. Your headline should also be keyword optimized. Research what keywords you want to be targeting with any of the free keyword research tools.

Effective internet advertising is professionally written and designed. Make sure you don’t have any grammatical or spelling errors, don’t use too many colors or fonts and try to use some “proven effective” shades as well.

Remember that your ad must have a “call to action”. Many advertisers forget this important step. After you’ve peaked your target audience’s curiosity and sold them on your benefits, you need to tell them what to do. Show them where to click so that they will be directed back to your website or wherever it is that you want to lead them. Always have a way for the reader to get in contact with you. Don’t make them search for it.

Incorporate an opt-in form to your advertisement. This is where your reader will fill in his/her details. Offering a free trial or free informational guide are some ways to get your reader to fill out the opt-in contact information. Don’t make him/her fill in too much information. The more they are required to put in, the more they are likely to just not enter in their information.

The response you get is also enhanced with your personal touch. If you can follow up by making a phone call to each of the new members on your customer lead list, you are miles ahead of the game in terms of establishing your trust-worthiness and credibility.

Finally, keep yourself in tune with what the market is offering in terms of effective internet advertising–new and innovative technologies are constantly being developed.

This post is in response to the comments made on my previous post #moonfruit Dominating Twitter With MacBook Pros.

There have been a couple of comments about going after the freebie seekers.

I did reply to these comments and I am going to elaborate here.

MoonFruit’s business model is targeted at freebie seekers.  They work with a free sign up and upsells, this means they are building a list of people that kind of fit into there target audience.

You will notice I said, “kind of” this is because the Twitter following they are building are people looking for a free MacBook Pro and not necessarily looking for a website.

With that said if they can get their followers away from the giveaway page and to their homepage they might end up with a decent sign up rate.

The service they provide is good for what they do but they aren’t promoting their service as much as they are the giveaway.  Most people don’t even know that they are also providing 5 years of their premium service.

This is the only area I see where they are missing the bus and I will grant them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they have their advertising push scheduled for after the giveaway is done.

But I still think they should make the point that they are giving away 5 years of their premium service a little more noticeable in their giveaway campaign.

This would get more people looking for the MacBooks reason to check out their Free Service offer.

Overall I think there are things they could do better, hopefully they do too, but the fact that they dominated the trending topics in twitter for two days with a term that most people didn’t know is still very impressive.

One other thing to point out is that of their 30,000+ followers most of them are real people.  Whereas I would bet that at least 20% of my 10,000+ followers are robots or people that never read the tweets.  I would also bet that the 20% is a very conservative number.

I would love to see a case study on this in the near future to see how well it did or didn’t work for them.

What about you?  Would you like to see a case study too?