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When you hear someone say website advertising or website marketing, do you think it means the same thing? In today’s fast paced society many people believe they mean the same thing, or they get the two mixed up. There is a big difference between the two, and I am here to try and break it down for you.

Website advertising is building your brand recognition and showing the general public what services or products you are offing. There are many forms of advertising your website, such include PPC, banner placement, text links (yes I did just say it), article writing, pod casting, targeted email campaigns. All of these are nothing more the different methods used to advertise a website. Website advertising is just a small piece to the big puzzle, many just seem to overlook it.

Website marketing is the strategic planning you do in an effort to help your website grow. Website marketing is the big puzzle, if you can put it together properly then you have a chance at succeeding with your website. However theirs no guarantee that a marketing plan will be successful even though you have taken all of the right steps in putting the puzzle together. So what is website marketing then?

Concepts – Here you will come up with and think about all possible concepts that you would like to use when advertising your website.

Research – Research is a very important step to take in your marketing strategy, you need to research your competition and see what they are doing. What keywords are they targeting, what websites have linked back to them, what anchor text are they using, what is the dominant catch phrases they are using in there online advertisements, etc. You do this not to copy them, but to see what is working for them and just better your efforts. You will then want to research and try to find other keywords that you can use as well, there could be highly searched keywords in your niche that your competition has not found yet. That will be a good ticket to punch in, finding those other highly searched keywords that have little to no competition. You will also want to take a look at Google or Yahoo and see what those keywords are going to cost you per click so you can factor that into your budget. The same thing goes for buying banner space, you will want to look for the sites you want to advertise on and see how much they charge and what size banner you get. Even a small 125×125 banner can cost a good amount of money on some high traffic websites. Do not try and rush through your research, you do not want to overlook something that could have propelled your website to the top.

Planning – Planning your website marketing is almost as crucial as the research you do beforehand. Here you will need to determine what roads you want to take your website down. Are you going to be heavily involved in PPC campaigns? Plan on buying up a lot of banner space on high traffic websites? Maybe you will want to write some good articles for your website in hopes that the social media craze will come and blow up your website. In some cases making the front page of Digg has taken some website offline due to poor hosting. A big factor in determine what you will be doing is your budget. Can you afford a highly target PPC campaign or buying banner space on high traffic sites? This goes back to the research you did before, you should know how much your keywords and banner ads will cost you. Now just take those figures and divvy them up among the direction you want to take your marketing campaign.

Design – Designing the right material (banner ads, PPC ads, email ads mainly) is very important for your marketing campaign to succeed. If your ads look and sound like crap, well then there is a good chance your marketing campaign will end up that way. You always want to design multiple ads no matter what. With multiple banner ads, you can then go over each design with your team, family or friends to see what everyone else’s opinion is and which would be the best to use. The same thing goes for your PPC ads because you have very little room to make a big impact on the person reading them. With PPC though, you have more room to test them and see which ones are converting better for you. They can be changed almost instantly with little effort, unlike banner ads or an email campaign.

Testing – Testing is pretty straight forward, here you test out your designs to see which ones you want to invest fully with.

Advertise – There is that other word, advertise. When you have finalized your designs and they have passed your quality tests you then begin advertising your website. If you chose PPC, banner ads and a dozen text links, then you are using three forms of advertising in your marketing campaign. This is the second to last step and the one where you go for it and see if your marketing strategies will pay off.

Research – Research again? Yes you do some more research again, this time though you need to find out what forms of advertising you used that paid off the best for you. This is where you will take a look at your website analytics or your PPC campaign to see where the traffic and conversions were coming from. After you have taken this data, you can go back and design any new ads that you see fit.

In the end, I want you to understand that website marketing is the strategic planning that you do for long term results. Website advertising is nothing more then a small piece of your planning and is really the “action phase”. When you advertise your website, you are putting forth the actions you designed and to implement in your marketing strategy.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.