... if you could raise your profile online using social networking, Twitter, blogs and online advertising?
Online advertising often appears complex and impossible to small business owners. In fact, it is one of the most effective ways to reach your market. For cost-conscious businesses, it is also the one medium where you can directly measure the cost and the results and adjust campaigns almost in real time.
Making your online advertising work
Keyword vs. display advertising. Online advertisers need to choose between display advertising or keyword advertising or a combination of both. Display advertising involves buying space on websites, typically on cost per thousand impressions basis. Keyword advertising refers to choosing specific search terms relevant to your audience, where your website is offered as a sponsored link on search results. You pay on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis for keyword advertising. If nobody clicks on your advertisement and visits your site, you don't pay a penny. Keyword advertising tends to be more cost effective for smaller businesses while display ads tend to be better at communicating brand identity and can be used for larger campaigns.
Keyword research. To get the best results from your advertising, you need keyword research to identify the most-searched terms in your field. Online advertising companies have tools that will help you identify popular keywords.
Landing pages. Not all search needs to be directed to the home page. Depending on your goals, direct users to the appropriate page. For example, if you offer a special discount, you can direct users to a landing page that lets them see what they're getting and which lets you track how effective that offer was.
Monitoring results. One way to evaluate landing pages is to send half your links to one page and half to another so that you can understand which works better. You can also test keywords using data from Google Analytics to see which search results got you the most readers. This helps you drop keywords that are unprofitable.
Organic search. While pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a very effective way to advertising, your website design and content itself can play a big role in how your site pops up on non-paid search results. By using the right keywords and tags, (and using them consistently), you can ensure that your search rankings on the major engines stay high. This is called search engine optimisation and it is as important as paid-for advertising.
Newsletter advertising. Besides display and keywords, advertising or sponsoring a column on a newsletter read by your audience can also be a good option. This reaches a specific community who have signed in to receive updates on a particular field.
Consider all your options. Don't ignore PPC advertising opportunities on other sites besides Google. Consider Yahoo! and Microsoft's Bing search engines too. Remember, you only pay for clicks and less popular sites might cost less per click.
to see which search results got you the most readers. This helps you drop keywords that are unprofitable.
