Online Advertising

Some of you may already be in the renewable energy business and for others you are just getting ready to jump into the industry and open up your own shop. This 3 part series is for any of you who are in business or getting into business or are just in charge of your companies lead generations and sales or marketing. I have worked in several different industries and the one thing that carries over from each is marketing and it is a key piece of business. I have done work on websites where they had no tracking in place and once we got it in place found out they were only getting a few dozen people a month to the site and with some tweaking and work on the site to start with got that number up to several hundred people in a month. Now you throw some relatively cheap forms of advertising up and watch this number jump to 1200-1800 people a month visiting your website. Proper advertising and marketing of your company is a must and in this part and the following parts I will go into some of those methods and the results you can see with relatively little effort.

I am going to start off with a basic and easy to use form of advertising which is pay per click or PPC. There are several companies out there that offer this service but the easiest and most common one is Google’s Adwords. You simply setup an account, verify it and have a account for the payments to be made from. Once your account is setup you then setup your ads and keywords, now I can go into an entire book on keywords and could write an entire other series on doing your ad copy and dos and don’ts but for now will just cover the basic overviews of the services and results.

Google Adwords is easy to setup and can be run rather cheaply. It is a great tool for getting traffic to your site immediately and only paying for the clicks that drive people to your site where as others will charge you for the number of times your ad shows up on pages. So if your looking to get some quick and cheap exposure to your site Google Adwords is a great tool to start off with while you do other things like organic search optimization of your website which will get you more traffic in the long run but for those of you who want results now then Adwords will get you those results.

Now when you sign up Google has a great help and tutorial learning center for its Adwords service. If you are new and do not know much about it and want to do it yourself then its best to review its guidelines and recommendations. Another option is to go out and hire someone to manage and run it for you and there are a number of services out there that will do this. Usually they will setup the campaigns for you, find some good keywords, get the ads setup, run everything for a week or two then re-evaluate it all and make changes and run new test ads. SEO Site Tech offers this service for small businesses but there are many other companies out there that offer PPC management however you will have to dig a little if you are looking to pay anything under $800/month for management but there are companies out there that cater to the smaller businesses and do $100/month management fees and $50 setup fees and such.

This brings us to an end for this section of this series on online advertising. If you’re a new renewable energy business or just looking to get started and get the word out Google Adwords is a great tool. Besides it being a great tool it is something you should really be doing anyway if you have a website because it’s a waste of money to pay for a site then let it sit there and do nothing. In the next section I talk about social media marketing and will touch on facebook and twitter. Then after that I will go into some other services like paid ads per impression and press releases and will touch on search engine optimization a little more also.