As a small business owner I have no doubts that you are an expert in your field. What you probably aren't though, is an expert in Internet Advertising. Right?
No worries, because in this article I'm going to share with you some of the best ways to advertise your business on the Internet. Ready? Good! Let’s get started!
Pay-per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Pay-per-click advertising, while synonymous with Google Adwords these days, goes way back to a company called Overture that was purchased by Yahoo many years ago.
As the name suggests, paper click advertising uses a model where the advertisers (like you) only pay when a potential customer clicks on their ad. If you've ever been on the Internet and ever used the Google search engine then you are already familiar with what pay-per-click advertising looks like even if you aren't entirely sure how it works. Pay-per-click ads are the ads at the top of the Google search results and to the right-hand side of the search results. You'll also see them on blogs and other third-party websites that host “Adsense” ads as a means to make money.
How It Works
Let me be clear, this will be a gross oversimplification! You the business owner develop small advertisements which you then upload them to Google's AdWords platform. Once they're approved they show up in the search results and on third-party sites depending upon how you choose to display your ads and how much you're willing to pay.
Every time someone clicks on your ad Google charges your credit card and a potential prospect is directed to your website.
Again, this explanation is a gross oversimplification but essentially that is how it works.
Organic Search Engine Advertising
Organic search engine advertising involves creating a website that has good, valuable content, on page optimization, perceived authority and a healthy amount of user activity.
You may have heard the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) before. SEO is the art and science of tweaking the aforementioned parameters to ensure that your site shows up on the first page of Google for your most important keyword phrases.
Depending upon your marketplace and how competitive it is organic search engine advertising can either be a relatively easy and inexpensive task or an extremely difficult and expensive task. Since your customers trust the organic search results listings more than paid advertising there is a tremendous benefit to employing organic search engine advertising.
Article Marketing And Press Release Marketing
Article marketing and press release marketing are great ways to both build your expertise and authority in your local market as well as to drive traffic to your website and/or business directly. What we find is that most business owners have neither the time nor the patience to consistently write articles and press releases and so turn to outside agencies to do this for them. However, if you are a die hard do-it-yourselfer you can head over to www.ezinearticles.com or http://www.free-press-release-center.info/register.php and get started immediately for free. Ezinearticles has a very good series of tutorials that explain exactly how to develop high quality articles.
Online Banner Advertising
You've seen these before, right? Banner ads are those advertisements that show up on news sites, blogs and probably your e-mail home page at the top of the page, to the right left of the page, and sometimes embedded right in the page!
It should be no surprise that Google has the largest inventory of potential sites on which to advertise your banners if you choose to do so. They even have some pretty good self-serve tools that allow you to easily create your own banners, upload them to their system, and even choose how, when and where your banners are placed. Unlike paper click advertising, banner advertising is priced not by the click but by the number of “impressions”. An “impression” is simply a fancy way to say that your ad was displayed. So banner placements are priced in the unit of dollars per thousand impressions, or CPM. Don't be confused and think that CPM means cost per million impressions; the “M” represents the Roman numeral for 1000.
Internet advertising services represent one of the few advertising and marketing segments that are experiencing growth. Why? The reason is simple really… it WORKS! Still, internet advertising services can be confusing and even a little intimidating if you don’t work in that world day in and day out. Fortunately, there are Internet advertising services that specialize in bringing new customers to local and regional businesses. Find one, give them a call and put the pros to work for you. It will be one of the best business investments you’ll ever make.
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