A successful internet advertising campaign is coveted by most businesses, whether they are primarily online or offline. Even offline businesses need to take advantage of the best means of getting customer traffic. And their potential customers are online. Setting up an effective online advertising campaign can not be handled with a cookie-cutter approach. All businesses, products and services are different and consumer demographics and attitudes also vary from one product to the next. There are some general guidelines that you can follow to set up a solid framework for your campaign.

First, identify your target market if you haven’t already done so. It’s surprising the number of people who start businesses without realizing who their customers are, or many long-term business owners who haven’t kept up with the shifts in customer trends. In order to eventually reach your ideal internet advertising campaign, you need to understand your customers/potential customers very well. What are they looking for. What concerns them? Write down a list of questions that you could ask your target audience and find the answers. This will help you to reach them with your promotional efforts.

If you are on a low budget, you can start with free advertising at any of the social networking sites like FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. The key here is to be social. Include all of your business information and websites in your profile but you shouldn’t go out blasting your network with promotional messages or comments.

You can also start a free blog at Blogger.com which provides information about the products and services you offer.  Still staying in the low cost and blogging sphere, you can create your own blog to represent your business at a low cost and improve your business appearance over the free blogging platforms.  Sites like Blogging Beginners will show you how.

Or you can try article marketing which means creating informational articles about your business and submitting them to the article directories. YouTube is another fantastic way to do free (social) promotion. Upload a video or tutorial that is helpful to the people you are trying to target. More and more people are jumping on the YouTube bandwagon. It’s not the only video sharing site, but it is the most popular. Other forms of no-cost promotion include participation in your industry’s forums and/ or placing free online classified ads. Free advertising can be very effective, but it does take time to start seeing results. The goal is to provide real value to your audience and to be persistent and consistent in your efforts.

In terms of paid advertising, you can choose to run some PPC (pay per click) ads on your favorite search engine, paid online classifieds and banner ads on other websites that are relevant to your business. Ezine advertising is another effective method. Again, here it’s important that you do some research. Choose an ezine which suits your target marketing. Of course, you want to go with the ones that have more subscribers but the responsiveness of the subscribers is also very important. Get as much information as you can from the ezine publisher before committing to an advertisement.

Your internet advertising campaign should never be stagnant. It changes and adapts as you learn and your business grows.

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?

Now I thought I was doing pretty good with twitter.  After all I have over 10,000 followers since May 18^th.  Roughly 6 weeks.

Most people would be happy with that.  But I want you to look at the top Trending Topic.

You might be like me and wonder what the heck is #moonfruit?

I honestly didn’t know and they have been around for ten years and they provide a website creation/hosting service.

Now you might be wondering (like I did) how did they get to be the #1 trending topic for two days in a row (so far)?

Simple they are giving away Free MacBook Pros! I will tell you how to get one later but for right now let me show what this has done for them and why they are dominating twitter.

First to win the MacBook Pro you have to be following them on twitter and this has resulted in their following growing by 30,000 in two days and still growing every minute of every day.

Now you might look at that and for some strange reason say, “That isn’t 30,000” as if 23,000 in two days wasn’t enough.

You are right that isn’t 30,000 because twittercounter.com doesn’t do live updates but here is a screen shot of their twitter account within minutes of capturing the counter you see above.

Now you see the 30,000 in two days and I guarantee that number is a lot higher now.

Remember this is being done totally within twitter.  Not with some big press release or a hugh email campaign or a ton of JV partners.

Now yes this will cost them roughly $20,000 because they are giving away 10 MacBook Pros and 10 – 5 year accounts with their service.  But in the long run it will most likely pay for itself because of the advertising they are getting on twitter.

I didn’t know what MoonFruit was and you might not have either but now at least 30,000 people do and have tweeted about it.

Do you want the chance to win a free MacBook Pro?

Here is what you have to do:

1.) You must be at least 16 years of age

2.) You must have a twitter account

3.) You must be following moontweet on twitter

4.) You must tweet at least once with #moonfruit in the tweet

That’s it! You can easily tweet it just by clicking on one of the twitter meme buttons at the top or bottom of this post.

By the way this only runs until July 10^th so if your are going to try to get one do it now.

Now if you don’t have $20,000 to spend to get a promotion like this together you might want to take a look at the Twitter Online System it won’t build your followers at a rate of 30,000 in two days but it will get you going the right way.

For more detail you can see the give away page here