Note that I am using estimates based on search engine traffic, this is because search engines account for more than 90% of website traffic to any website. People use search engines to find relevant websites. Another fact is that people usually view only the first two pages of the search engine results. This means that a website should be within those pages to stand a chance of attracting descent traffic. If not and you are advertising in it then you are wasting your hard earned cash because no one will ever see your advert. Look at it this way; you are advertising on a “newspaper” that never gets circulated.

As a Swazi based business, If you could advertise on all of these pages it means that your advert would be seen about 240 000 times per month (3 million times annually). Given the fact that advertising on the internet is very cheap, this is a lucrative advertising medium to use. Also online advertising is great because of its targeted nature. People visit websites they are interested in, so it means that this estimated 240 000 is based on people who are actually interested in Swaziland .

As an online marketer, I have observed how Swazi businesses are coerced into buying advertising on some of the poor quality Swazi websites. They are given absolutely false information about traffic statistics and also told about the future potential hopeless websites. Yes the idea of online advertising is great but be careful of becoming a charity organizing funding a dream with a lost course.

You don't need to be an expert to identify potential websites for your advertising campaigns. Interestingly you don't even need to use Swazi website to target Swazi consumers. Online advertising is so advanced such that you could use Yahoo or Google to reach Swazi online surfers. You only pay when you reach that target group in fact you never reach any group except the one you specify.

Before I end this article let me give you a few simple pointers for identifying the right website to use for campaigns targeted at the Swazi market.

•  Web traffic: When the web publisher/owner makes a sales pitch to you ask him or her about traffic statistics. Most hosting companies offer this tool free so the website owner should have or else he/she is afraid of making you aware that you are about to waste you money on a website that never gets traffic.

You should also ask about traffic sources for their website i.e. where it is coming from by continent, country, region, city etc. This is important to you as an advertiser who is interested in getting on target marketing:

You don't' want to waste you money advertising to people who couldn't careless about your business or even if they did they can't do anything about it. This information is not hard to find for serious web publishers. For one Google offers this service free of charge for all web publishers.

•  Search engine rank position: As I said ealier on, +90% of all web traffic is controlled by search engines this means then that a good website should be within the first 10 pages of any search engine especially Google. You could also consider one appearing in the top 20. This ranking should be based on their keyword (every website must have a specific keyword[s] e.g. Swaziland , from which their whole site is based). This is used to attract relevant traffic. For example a paid survey site uses “paid survey” as their keyword and the words appear frequently on their site and giving a high probability of attracting traffic interested in paid surveys (i.e. getting paid to fill in survey questionnaires online). The link below gives an example of this point. Click here to see example

•  Know and test the website's keywords: ask the publisher about the keywords (or keyword phrases) they use in their website. Go to Google and type them in one at a time. Look through the first 20 pages of the returned results and if their website is not there then it means it misses +90% of all the potential traffic. Don't be fooled by their claims of ranking high on some smaller search engines. The top search engines to test them on are Google , Yahoo , MSN and Alltheweb.com

For example click the link below to see sites that appear within the top 10 for the keywords (these are the only sites I recommend for advertising your Swazi product/service in - if your company relates with the keywords because they are more likely to attract traffic more than any other Swazi website) “ swazi consumers ” “ Swaziland marketing trends ”, “ Swaziland banking ” Swaziland radio trends , Swaziland shopping , Swaziland television trends , Swaziland brands . You can manually type these in Google or try more of your own later.

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There are about 80 million web pages that have information about Swaziland on the web.

On average there are about 8000 searches made on top search engines relating to Swaziland . This means that there are about 240 000 searches made per month (about 3 million per year). You could say this is the estimated total market size for “ Swaziland ” as a product, service or potential holiday destination (out of the 1 billion global internet users). If you have a Swazi based business, then, in general terms this is your global market size.