The A-Ha! Moment

When our company, Web Ad.vantage, Inc. was founded back in 1998, few people knew what Internet marketing was. In fact, although our purpose has always been to help web sites gain visibility and traffic, we did not start out as the online marketers that we’ve evolved to today. It wasn’t until we had our “A-Ha! moment” did we change gears and begin to the services we do now.

What do I mean by an “A-Ha! moment”? It’s the flash of clarity, the peek through the keyhole that brings all things past and future into focus. There are many triggers for A-ha! moments: a visual cue, something you hear someone say, or simply a moment when all the pieces of a puzzle floating around your head finally fit together and speak an answer to you.

Why is this relevant to this newsletter? Well, Dear Reader, I have had another A-Ha! moment of my own recently, and this time it involves you.

You see, this newsletter is now in its fourth year of publishing and yet after repeated kinds of reader feedback and questions, it’s become evident to me that few subscribers understand that we, as the publishers of all this wonderful (and free!) Internet marketing information, also perform the services about which we write! Coming to this realization in one of those A-Ha! moments, I realized that as marketers we must be doing a pretty piss poor job of marketing ourselves to our loyal reader base otherwise we might not be having the kind of disconnect we’re experiencing.

This is my long-winded way of saying that if you’d indulge me this week (and if, of course you’re interested), here is an encapsulated version of what WebAdvantage.net, THE AGENCY, does.

ROI-Driven Services

WebAdvantage.net is an emarketing agency that builds, executes and measures direct response strategies using the Internet. We help drive specific actions for our clients: acquisition, retention, optimization, conversion and sales.

The kinds of services we offer that are specifically ROI-focused are:

• Online Advertising

   

• Search Engine Optimization

   

• Keyword Strategies and Paid-For Placement Listings

   

• Email Marketing

   

• Affiliate Program Marketing

   

• Tracking and Performance Reporting

   

Online Advertising

WebAdvantage.net’s online advertising services break down into several phases:

1. Understanding Objectives - learning what our clients want to market, to whom, with what kind of budget, for what cost of acquisition and in what timeframe. Only then can we properly develop an advertising plan.

    

2. Research & Planning - researching the various online and email advertising opportunities best suited to meet a client’s objectives and then developing a budget & timeline (Media Plan) for purchasing, creating, testing, and running online advertisements.

    

3. Creating & Trafficking - producing advertisements per the specifications of the buy and getting ads to the appropriate Web publishers in time to launch the campaign. We also work with client’s own creative teams when applicable.

    

4. Auditing, Tracking & Performance Reporting - making sure ads run where & when they’re supposed to; tracking how well they generate the desired response; and generating reports for the clients based on these responses.

    

5. Campaign Optimization - one of the beautiful things about the Web (as compared to most other advertising media) is that it’s fairly simple to change ad campaigns mid-stream if they’re not performing well…that is, if you are even monitoring campaign performance to begin with. This process of monitoring and changing to improve overall campaign performance is called campaign optimization, and it’s something WebAdvantage.net takes very seriously. Otherwise, how would we be successful at helping our clients reach their campaign objectives?

    

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Hopefully by now you know that WebAdvantage.net’s search engine optimization services has earned a prestigious 5 out of 5 Star Rating from the independent “Marketing Sherpa SEO Buyer’s Guide.”

We’re very proud of this rating as it only affirms what we already know: in a nutshell, we help our clients get top placements in search engine query results pages (separate and apart from any paid-for placements on these pages, which I’ll get to momentarily).

Keyword Strategies and Paid-For Placement Listings

Different than our SEO services, paid-for placement listings are guaranteed exposure in search engines that come at a cost. Simply put, they are a unique kind of advertisement. WebAdvantage.net can help maximize results while minimizing costs of paid-for placement campaigns through its pre-campaign keyword strategy & planning services as well as campaign tracking, performance reporting and campaign optimization services.

Email Marketing

Email marketing can be done in three primary ways:

1. By cultivating and mailing to your own private email list
2. By renting someone else’s list
3. By piggy-backing on someone else’s email delivery

    

WebAdvantage.net can assist clients in all 3 areas and in varying degrees of involvement. For example, perhaps you only know you want to do email marketing but you don’t know what to do or say. WebAdvantage.net can provide its consulting services. Or, if you want to ultimately amass your own list but you don’t have one yet, you then have an acquisition issue, which WebAdvantage.net can help devise a plan for. If you need to reach an unfamiliar market, you may want to rent someone else’s email list. For this project, WebAdvantage.net can help you find targeted, responsive lists for rent and manage the whole project. Lastly, there’s always the offer within an offer where you take advantage of someone else’s actual email delivery to deliver your own message (such as our newsletter advertisers herein are doing). We locate and negotiate these kinds of placement opportunities for our clients.

Affiliate Marketing

Having affiliates is like having your own commission-only sales team. Affiliates are Web and email publishers that promote your web site/product/services in exchange for monetary reward. There are multiple options for setting up and managing an affiliate program, and WebAdvantage.net can help make these assessments for you.

Once you establish the means to run an affiliate program, there’s also the very real issue of marketing the program and recruiting affiliates. By setting up and implementing a strategy to do so, WebAdvantage.net tends to a very important (and often overlooked) part of affiliate marketing.

Tracking & Performance Reporting

I mentioned tracking earlier when talking about ad campaigns, but tracking can (and for any direct response campaign, should) be incorporated for most Web marketing efforts. It enables us to not only see direct response results, but also to analyze bottom line costs of online marketing initiatives and to spot traffic trends we might otherwise be unaware of. We know from experience that tracking and performance reporting can justify and lead to greater use of the Web as a marketing tool.

Other WebAdvantage.net Services

We provide a host of other Internet marketing-related services from consulting to web site copywriting to developing strategic partner relations. To learn more about our full array of services please visit Internet Marketing Services page.

And, of course, if you’ve now had an “A-Ha!” moment of your own, realizing that the company that publishes one of your favorite newsletters can also help get you marketed online, please do not hesitate to send us an email or give us a call at 410-297-9495.

Thanks for allowing me the detour of this self-indulgent newsletter. I promise that with the next issue, we will go back to our regular programming.

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