Mike Seidle ...notes from the road

t’s impossible to gaze into a crystal ball and see the future of Internet marketing. But it is possible to see the writing on the wall, and to be ready to change your marketing strategies.

Pay-per-click advertising continues to increase in cost, and its effectiveness is waning. It’s not dead, however; buyers are still searching – but competition has caused an inflation in the cost of clicks, and

SEO brings you traffic for free. I’ve already extolled the virtues of a properly optimized site. As far as traffic goes, you can’t beat it for the price.

Affiliate marketing allows you to pay for sales and leads, not for clicks. Some of our clients have completely replaced Google’s pay-per-click programs with pay for lead or pay for sale affiliate programs. Why? Because it is generating more sales and better results than we see with Pay-Per-Click.

Offline to Online. For many companies, the website has historically been a branding and PR tool and less of a lead generator. If you spend a lot on offline advertising (print, TV, radio, billboards), consider connecting your real world campaigns with microsites and landing pages. Instead of flooding the call center with thousands of uninterested buyers, the web allows you to collect more information – and make better decisions about where your sales team spends it's time.

Some offline media products are becoming more and more important – and are performing exceedingly well delivering strong lead generation and traffic to websites. Bathroom ads are capable of rapidly driving people to websites or to five digit text message lead captures through their cell phone.