Advertising Your Business Online

Online business advertising need not be costly

There is a common perception that, if you want to advertise your business online, you need to spend significant sums of money. However, this is not true. In fact one of the beauties of the online channel is that any business however large or small has many opportunities to advertise.

Compare this with television advertising for instance where even the smallest and shortest advertising segment on a channel that no-one watches will still be out of reach of most modest budgets. Therefore online is a more accessible channel to advertise on for most companies.

The first thing you need if you are going to advertise online is a website of some sort that people will get directed to as a result of your advertising method working successfully. For hints and tips on that side of things, you can view some of my other articles on these topics.

Online Advertising Methods

So, you have the website and want to advertise. There are many methods you can use, some paid for, and others not.

One effective method is to try to build links with other businesses that are relevant or complimentary to yours. Not only can this help you get traffic directly from those sites but it can also help your site be found and indexed by search engines and give you more exposure that way.

Another option is to have others advertise your business for you on a commission basis - you only pay them if they successfully sell your service on. This is called an affiliate scheme. The way it works is you allow people to sign up as members of your affiliate scheme, and in return they place banners or text links on their sites which advertise your products. The software tracks any referrals they give you - and if these are converted into sales, you pay them an agreed commission - usually in the range of 5 - 15% though you can set your own limits.

There are also many business directories that you may find it useful to advertise in. Many of these are free, however some will charge you a fair sum of money. Most of these will not be worth it - if there is one site that is prestigious and well known and trusted in your industry then by all means use that but otherwise you can consider this wasted money at least initially.

Particularly popular are schemes whereby you advertise on search engines against specific terms. The most well known scheme is the Google Adwords scheme. Here you sign up for an Adwords account and set a budget for how much you want to spend on a monthly basis, and how much you are prepared to pay for each click.

You set your adverts to be triggered by certain keywords. So if you are selling tennis racquets then you might target keywords to do with tennis. Your adverts then appear in the sponsored links on the search engine if you have the daily budget and your agreed cost per click is high enough to activate your advert and appear on that particular page of results.

When someone clicks the link to your site, you get charged for that click. The idea is of course that this is a very warm lead - as someone has searched for something very closely related to, or indeed exactly, what you sell, so there is a healthy chance that they will buy from you.

The great thing with this program is that you can start with very small exposure to test whether it works, and you can cap how much you spend or de-activate your campaign at any time, so you have great control over it. Many people report good success with the scheme; as with most things the more you learn about the scheme and the more practice you get at setting ads the better your return is likely to become.

So - there are some tips on how to build exposure and advertise your business online. Finally, just remember to always include your website address in your emails and any posts you may make to websites and forums - you never know when someone will see your post, click on your web address, and place a nice healthy order!

Author: Dan

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Last Updated: Sep 1st 2006

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