Many novice entrepreneurs shy away from advertising and rely on methods such as social bookmarking, social networking, forums, chat rooms, blog comments, etc. for free traffic. There is no doubt that these methods should be used but as with any business whether online or offline it is essential that you do not fear investing money for greater returns. Pay Per Click Advertising Pay per click advertising is by far the most powerful type advertising available because it provides you with targeted results and you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement as opposed to pay per impression advertising where you have to pay every time your advertisement displays. Pay per click advertising provides small business owners an opportunity to get targeted traffic without having to spend a fortune. Properly using pay per click That said, you need to properly set up your advertising campaign. You need to keep an eye on your ROI (return on investment). Simply running a pay per click advertising campaign will do you know good if you do not how many clicks are converting into loyal readers (if you run a content based website) or are buying your product and/or service (if you are selling a product and/or service). To see your ROI you need to track your visitors. When you set up a campaign with, let's say Google Adwords, you have the option of setting up a link to your website. Instead of just entering a link to your website, you need to set up a tracking link as follows http://www.yourwebsitedomain.com/track.php. This is one way of doing it. Now when a visitor clicks on your website, he/she will reach page track.php. Your track.php script will record, in an external file or database, that the user came to your website by clicking on your Google Advertisement, and then you can set up a session which will track your visitor as he/she browses your website. Finally, you will redirect your visitor to the main page. This will provide you with detailed analysis of your visitor's movements. If you are selling a product you will be able to tell if the person purchased the product or not and if he/she returns to the website after a while and purchases the product you will know. If you have a content based website, then you will know which headings and links attracted the visitor and which did not. This is just a glimpse of the kind of information you can get by incorporating tracking into your advertising campaign and you can use this information to improve your website content, product, service, etc. All in all, when beginning any advertising campaign it is essential that you keep a track on your ROI. Advertising is a must if you want to build a large reader database, but at the same time you need to keep an eye on how much profit your efforts are yielding.
Also an exceptional way to do marketing online while maximizing your budget is engaging in cross promotional advertising. When looking for those products to cross promote with you will want to look for those that will compliment your product, for example if you sell printers you will want to cross promote with a company that sells printer ink, paper, etc. And this is because you will not be competing against another company you will be enhancing both of your products at no cost for advertising. This will provide convenience for your customer because they will have all they need on your website. _________________ Bre D. www.csgserver.com