The Changing World Of Online Advertising

Online advertising has changed quite a bit over the last decade. In its infancy, online advertising consisted of banner ads. These lost their effectiveness after a while as people became accustomed to ignoring them. It did not take long for newer methods of advertising to come into play. That same process has repeated itself over the years. It seems as if there is always a newer and better way to advertise online.

When the effectiveness of banner advertising began to dwindle, pop up ads became the next big thing. They worked for a period of time but people grew weary of having ads shoved in their face and eventually software was developed to block this form of advertising.

FFA (Free For All) links sprung up as a way to advertise your site and get links. Most websites had FFA pages where visitors could leave a link to their website. Soon software was developed which automated this process and multiplied it so instead of leaving a few links manually every day, an advertiser could blast out thousands of links each day. In pretty short order that caused the death of FFA pages.

Pay per click advertising came on the scene shortly after that. With this method of online advertising, you could buy your way into the search engines by paying a few cents every time someone clicked your link. Pay per click advertising has evolved somewhat over the years. What started as one cent per click with GoTo has now turned in to several cents or even several dollars per click with Google Adwords. Competition is fierce among advertisers yet pay per click remains one of the most widely used forms of online advertising to this day.

Advertising in ezines has withstood the test of time although many marketers do not bother with ezines anymore, but publish lists instead. Still, there are many ezines that accept paid advertisements. Some will accept guest articles with resource links back to your website.

Article marketing is a fairly new method of online advertising. You write an article and post it to article directories or Web 2.0 sites. Your article contains a link back to your website. This provides a link for web surfers to follow and also provides a back link which can help you rank higher in the search engines.

One method that has been in place from the very beginning and still is effective today is SEO (search engine marketing.) Of course, SEO practices are constantly changing to stay ahead of those who spam and try to game the system. Staying current with SEO techniques is probably one of the most important things you can do to be successful online. If you can rank high in the search engines, you will get traffic for free. If you rank well for a term that gets a lot of searches every day, you can get a lot of traffic.

Does it all sound confusing? - it can be at times. However, there are companies who exist that can manage your online advertising for you. You can hire a pay per click management service and even someone to manage and run your advertising programs for you. Of course, you need to weigh up the benefits of outsourcing any work, but if they are true professionals the returns should quickly justify everything you put into it.