Okay, so you’ve created an awesome website with an excellent user interface and lots of attractive graphics. You have an excellent product or service that is in demand in the marketplace, and you’ve set a reasonable price that should lead to lots of sales. That’s all fine and dandy, but the truth is that your business isn’t going anywhere unless you can generate consistently high volumes of traffic to your websites over time.
Even though there are many free methods that you can use to drive traffic, it’s hard to beat the speed and ease of using a paid advertising campaign. As long as you have a reasonable budget and are willing to go through a learning curve, you’re ready to check out these four major options for paid online advertising.
Google AdWords (Pay-per-click Advertising)
Pay per click advertising is an excellent alternative for companies who have the financial resources and can make an investment in order to bring targeted traffic to their websites. Like SEO traffic, AdWords is considered targeted because people are actually typing in keyword phrases that are relevant to your products and services before clicking on your advertisement. This can bring a flood of traffic to your online business very quickly, and this is an excellent choice as long as you’re able to turn a profit.
That’s where the problem usually lies for small companies who are inexperienced with this form of advertising. There is a lot of competition in pay per click campaigns these days, and it is very easy to waste a great deal of money if you don’t have the experience. Many e-commerce stores get wrapped up in bidding wars that cost product margins to drop substantially. Therefore, if you’re going to give this form of advertising a try, just make sure that you take an excellent training course and be ready to invest some money in the beginning while you figure out the entire process.
Banner Advertising
This form of online advertising is even older than the search engines themselves, and the concept is pretty simple. You simply put some sort of banner (usually with a catchy image and headline) on a relevant website. Users who choose to click the banners will end up on your website and hopefully will make a purchase. The problem is that these days, web users have developed “banner blindness” so only a small percentage will actually click on your ad. With this in mind, you need to make sure that you’re not paying very much for your advertising, especially if you are paying a certain amount per impressions (impressions means that your ad would show up a certain number of times and you will get charged regardless of whether anyone actually clicks on your advertisement).