Online Advertising Options

The Best Online Advertising Options

Online advertising.  SEO.  Video.  Ad Words.  Pay-Per-Click.  Articles.  Blogs. What are the best options for your business?

Sometimes confusing and mostly over whelming, we face more choices as business owners than anyone when advertising our company, it's products and services.  Our ultimate goal is to drive traffic to our site and ultimately cash to our coffers.  So what is the best way to advertise? 

The answer to that question is especially difficult if you are currently growing your business and facing the daily challenges of running your business.  Business owners make choices based upon the best solution at the time and time is a scarce resource.  Sometimes, with limited inform-ation and the difference in the options rarely understood, a business owner will opt for one way or another based on their feelings and a recommendation from a peer.  You might base your decision on price alone.  My hope is to share briefly a bit about your online SEO advertising options so you can make an informed decision.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  This is a comprehensive and one of the ways to move to the top of search engines.  It works by effectively taking your money and in return giving you a chance at traffic form all sorts of folks from all sorts of places.  It is not without it's own set of problems.  It can be expensive especially if you hire outside resources to set up accounts with several major search engines and you start paying for your keywords.  I know.  I have been down that path and sometimes, I would pay out much more for the exposure than the profits I could make on the additional sales.  If you are considering using adwords, pay-per-click and SEO strategies, set your budget.   Check out the person or company doing your SEO work.  There are great people out there doing SEO work but it may not be the best choice for your business unless you market nationally and have deep pockets to fund adwords and pay per click advertising.

The other thing I have found about this form of advertising and marketing is you are competing against the big dogs.  National companies have deep pockets.  The question is, can afford to pay more to get to the top of search engines?  As a local business owner, your market area may be within a few miles to a few hundred miles of your business.  Does it make sense to pay SEO companies to compete against national advertisers for your share of local business?  If you have high margin items and little competition, maybe so.  But if you own a nail salon, beauty parlor or hundreds of other types of service businesses, you probably have better options.

Local Business Owners need to get the most bang for their buck.  A watchful eye on results, a hand on the pocketbook and new technology and options offer the local business owners a way to get the most bang for their buck in their local market.  I recently was introduced to a company entirely focused on local target marketing for local business owners.  Great concept and a great product.

I will discuss these and other options for local businesses and in detail in a future blog.  If you decide to pay to get to the top of search engine queries, keep in mind, you could be paying a premium price to have consumers outside your trade area see your ad.  Maybe that is not money well spent.

Until next time, have a great day.

Paul Clark is an accomplished speaker and leader in direct sales and marketing.  Paul's focus is on online advertising options and online advertising solutions for business owners.  Total business advertising solutions are key to market penetration for local business owners.