Nigerian Technopreneur gets creative… smsadsng.com

I have said a time and again that; Nigerian web industry will witness a shift this year, yea… a shift! The move will include penetration to the mainstream, new business models, more engaging site and site with local contents.

Smsadsng.com is powered by txtoweb.com a relatively new company but with advance technology. Text to web helps you advertise on the web via SMS, you simply enter you pitch of not more than 160 characters, send it to the short codes, and people on the web sees it live!

The New Deal

Many classified ads websites emerged last year; leading the pack is nairalist.com founded by Seun Osewa the owner of nairaland.com. Many other websites offering same service have come on board. To take it a little further, smsadsng.com makes it more flexible to get the message out. Creating a niche in the classified ads space.

The Real Deal

As the advertisement market expands, this site has shown a new way to tap the growing market in Nigeria.

Down Side

Well as the case in traditional advertising industry, the number of eyeballs to a large extents determine the price and growth. This site is relatively new and currently gets less traffic than some other Nigerian sites. Each time ad is added to the site, the older one goes down the trail. This I think will not afford some ads to be seen by targeted audience.  The site is currently being pushed via Google and Facebook ads.

Business Model

This employs a small fee to get listed on the ad page, hence the business model employed by this site, simply advertisement! It’s a good market and will eventually grow in the coming years in Nigeria.

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Selecting where to advertise online for effective return

We last discussed about what online advertisement is, and its various advantages. We will be exploring today, where to place your ads to make good return on your effort.

Currently, Google takes home the large chunk of online advertising revenue. There are thousands of other sites you can advertise on, as the list keeps growing, the need to be more targeted and semantic arises. For effective advertising, you really need to know where your target audience is, what type of advert they consume, their surfing habit and time zones, etc. These will influence your choice of advertising medium. Let’s explore some …

Google Adwords

This is the flagship Google advertising product that has given high returns in recent times. With Google search remaining the leading search engine, the performance of this medium has continued to interest advertisers. Also looking at Google’s ad network, Adsense, it gives a better way to reach people in a more targeted way. The ads are contextual, placing your ads only to where related issues are behind discussed. Google advert is based on budget; you can specify how much you want to spend per ad per day and how much you are willing to per pay ad.

Yahoo

Is world’s most visited site and also uses geotargeting methods to serve ads, it can display ads relevant to Nigeria for someone browsing the net from Nigeria. Giving the number of people who use yahoo in Nigeria, it is sure a good advertising medium for you to consider. Yahoo advert is also based on budget; you can specify how much you want to spend per ad per day and how much you are willing to per pay ad.

Facebook

Currently the golden fish of social networking sites, Facebook has grown beyond 300 million active users, giving you a platform to reach million of people faster. Facebook ads are more targeted than other advertising platform like Yahoo and Google. With Facebook, you can target by country, region, age, sex and interest. This gives you options to target your niche better. Facebook is currently the second most visited site in Nigeria after Yahoo (overall).

News Sites

In our last ranking on most visited Nigerian sites, about 60% of the top ten are made up of news sites. Which to a large extent shows the browsing habit of Nigerians, and also let you to know the sites mostly visited by Nigerians. Though, Nigerian sites don’t have performance measuring tools, but their hits are considerably good.

Niche sites

To my observation, niche sites have a better Click-through-rate (CTR) given the relevance of your ad to the audience on the particular site. Like webtrendsng.com which is target at web people and people who are interested in web technologies, advertising a site or product with these people in mind gives a better return on your ads. Look around for sites with related interest in what you want to advertise, and you will get good return on your money.

Online advertising is the future, given the rate at which people move online. Couple with the fact that online advertisements are targetable, measurable and delivers value, the need to understand how to go about it is key to getting best from it.

In our next Issue, we will look at how to measure your advertisement performance and planning.

Have you advertised lately online or thinking of doing so? Do you have any challenge? Let’s hear you!

Photo Credit: seosemway.com

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Twitter Marries Bing and Google; the market impact

Twitter, founded in 2006 by veteran web startups team and since then have been a choice of every internet marketer, blogger and companies as outpost to their various target audience. It has garnered as much as 50 million users making it move closer to full mainstream adoption.

One of the main benefits of twitter is its real-time nature giving updates of information as they occur around the world. Top search engines (Bing & Google) are worried at the pace twitter is moving, it reads on their faces that they had liked to acquired the firm but twitter has continuously rebuff acquisition. Even though it still struggles to make money, it’s a toast of everyone!

The deals

At the recent Web 2.0 submit, Microsoft announced the deal signed with both Twitter and Facebook to make updates from the sites available in their search results, giving people access to real-time information from the sites. Well, while the companies (Facebook & Twitter) are still struggling on profitability, I sure believe this deal is money backed, which is good news for them.

Entered Google; as the news of Bing’s deal making the headline, Google’s Marissa Mayer announced deal with twitter, also to make the tweets available on its search result. This is a good deal for Google for now, as more attention will be garnered and in the process make more money from its sponsored link.

Effect on Google and Bing

As the quest to garner attention grows, the giants are scouting as much as they can to get it through every available means. While this will create a big buzz for now and drag more people to the search engines, the relevancy will now be of great importance. Twitter updates are free and open to the public, user’s post are not monitored or verified hence people can make pitch and get listed on Google and Bing search result ASAP.

One of the advantages of these search engines (Google in particular), is relevance and correctness of their contents, the results from twitter updates (for now) can not be validated, and this will question the results of the search engines unless a separate tab is created. Look at it this way, if top ten results on either Google or Bing are from Twitter and they don’t in anyway match your request (after linking to the websites), what will you do? Make a new search? I guess they need to make the tab separate and uncluttered with the main result.

The winners are still the giants, more ads inventory to sell, more attention to be capture and more money to make!

Effect on Twitter

Well twitter is in search of money for its empire, having got funding up to $155M making, money is its top priority. While making money could be daunting, since most twitter users don’t use it from their home page, strategic alliance is sure a step they are looking into. They recently had a deal with Federated Media. Since Twitter doesn’t have the attention on its main site (to which it can make money), then the site’s bye-product “Tweets” is the way to go!

Twitter’s deal with the giants is a non-exclusive type, hence they can have same deal with as many companies as they like. This is a good deal for them; since these sites have the attention any site could be dreaming of.

General Market impact

As the socialization of content continues, more and more content will be visible from every angle. So if you say something about someone online, believe me another person can get to know about it.

Also getting your site listed on search engines is now a matter of making an update on your twitter account.

Companies should also be ready to manage their reputation across the board, because their customers will be everywhere speaking about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction of their products.

On the good side, if posted updates are relevant, the general searchers will be the one to benefit from it. They don’t need to search Twitter, Google and others to get information; a search is enough on a single search engine!

The battle for our attention continues, remember these giants’ needs to be profitable year-on-year so they are still in search of what’s hot around the internet. Expect more!

Photo credit: Mashable.com

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Online Advertisement do you need it?

I will like to discuss online advertising with you and how it can help your business. Online advertising is summed up by Wikipedia as “a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers”.

I will like us to stress these two words promotion and marketing. You guess definitely have something to promote or market before considering bringing it online. I will simply call this a process of trying to grab from the already scarce attention of internet users. Before I dive more into this topic let me bring these basic facts to your notice;

Advantages of Online Advertisement

• Online advertisment can be targeted to your actual customers (more than other medium)
• Online advertisement can be customized to meet you intended product or keywords
• Online advertisement is measurable (if it’s not working, you can simply stop it!)
• Cost effectiveness; online advertisement mostly allows you to pay for predetermined success by way of action performed by users or visit to your site.
• Immediate action: think about placing ad on your TV and someone sees it but before they logon to the internet they had forgotten your web address or product, how can you get them back? With online advertisement, you get them to link to you right from advert.
• Online advertising is the future: it has been reported that internet ads revenue beats their counterpart in the mainstream.

While the internet continues its growth, everyone will surely join the bandwagon. Currently in Nigeria there are about 11million people on the internet as the usage keep exploding day-by-day.

Online advertisement is surely the way to go, going by its result-oriented nature. Small businesses (and large ones too) should consider using this medium. While careful planning is very important before choosing one (irrespective of the media), these are the current top advertising sites: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and a host of others. I will suggest that you contact an expert in this area so as to guide you through the process.

We will be looking into choosing the right advertisement platform for your ads in my next post here.

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