Getting Started with Online Advertising

You have your website, it's optimized for search engines, and you're gradually acquiring inbound links. For some websites, that's all you need. But if you're selling a product or service online, putting your message in front of your target audience is key to increasing sales fast. Online or Internet advertising offers several advantages: It costs less than print advertising. You don't need to pay for paper, printing, or postage.

Customers are only a click away. With print advertising, the audience has to write down or remember a phone number, address, or website domain, and then call the number or go to the place of business (online or storefront). Online advertisements, on the other hand, have links to your website. Consumers just need to click on the ad if they want to find out more, and once at your site, they can make a purchase or perhaps bookmark the page to come back to later. You can reach your audience right away. To advertise in print publications, you have to book ad space days or weeks in advance. While the same is sometimes true for online advertising, some forms of online advertising get your ads online almost instantly. Your ads can be in front of your audience almost as soon as you're ready to advertise. Your ads can appear around the world. It doesn't cost any more to have your ads reach consumers on another continent than it does to reach people in your neighborhood. You can change your ads easily. If you see a typo or detail in your ad that you want to change, you don't need to reprint thousands of brochures. You make the change in one place, and everyone sees the new version of the ad from then on.

Let's look at some common ways to advertise online.

Banner advertising

Many sites have advertising space available for banner ads. Each advertising slot is for a specific banner size and for a specific location on a page.

Because banner ads are on so many sites, the response rate is not high. And with a typical click-through rate of two to five per thousand impressions, banners need to appear a lot of times to get noticed. They might appear several thousand times before any of those click-throughs become customers.

Banner ads have different types of rates:

• Click-through rate: you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
• Impression rate: you pay each time your ad appears on a page.
• Monthly rate: you pay to have your banner ad on a site for a month (or possibly another time period).

Or if you take part in a banner exchange with another site, you don't have to pay at all.

How can you advertise with banner ads?

• Look for an Advertising link at sites of interest to your target audience. This method allows you to carefully target where you advertise, but it can take time to find suitable sites.
• Use a banner network. Ad networks such as DoubleClick and BannerSpace find sites to place your ad. The drawback is that you can't choose where your ads appear.
• Exchange banners with other sites. Doing direct banner exchanges gives you control over where your banners appear and costs nothing.
• Join a banner exchange program. You may need to display two ads at your site for every ad of yours that appears at another site, and you don't have control over what ads appear at your site. You probably won't have control over where your ad appears at other sites. But the advertising is free.
• Hire an ad agency. An ad agency can negotiate prices for you and handle other details. Using an ad agency may not be cost-effective for smaller sites, however.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Pay-per-click advertising, also known as keyword advertising, is text advertising that appears next to search results. You bid on keywords, and when people search for those keywords, your text ad with a link to your site appears on the page next to the search results.

PPC advertising reaches targeted audiences, and its success depends on the keywords you choose and the ads you write for them. You can start or stop a PPC advertising campaign whenever you want, and you can change your ad text to experiment with different options. In addition, you can focus PPC ads on specific geographic areas. And when your ad is displayed but people don't click on it, you're building brand awareness without having to pay for the impressions.

The best-known keyword advertising programs are with the top three search engines:

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo Sponsored Search
• Microsoft adCenter

For more information about Google AdWords, see our blog article Advertising with Google Adwords. The steps outlined in this article apply to other pay-per-click advertising programs as well.

Pop-up and pop-under ads

Pop-up ads pop up in front of the web page that the site visitor is viewing, and pop-under ads appear after the current window is closed. They have a much higher click-through rate than banner ads do and therefore cost more. However, they're much more annoying than banner or text ads are.

Newsletters

Newsletters are published about almost every topic imaginable, and many of them include paid advertising, either text or banner ads. They have targeted audiences of people who signed up to receive those newsletters. Also, many newsletters are published online in addition to being sent to people on their mailing lists.

To find newsletters to advertise in, search for "newsletter," topic keywords, and "advertise."