The reason for doing any kind of advertising is to get the message out to your community of actual and potential customers that they should take some kind of action which ultimately results in new customers and additional sales for you.
This has always been the case for off-line advertising such as television and radio ads, newspaper ads and direct marketing.
Experience has shown that the approaches to on-line advertising are no different to those traditionally used for off-line advertising.
This article describes three such approaches.
Small business owners often start advertising online before they try any advertising offline but the reality is that a combination of both can be especially effective.
There are plenty of ways to advertise online and your main focus for all of them should be building your brand.
Here are just three of the ways you can advertise online.
SEO Marketing: Having a website is an essential part of advertising online.
It's your hub.
It's where people can find you, and it's where people can flock to give you money.
One of the best ways for people to find your website is to have it ranking in search engines such as Google and Bing.
Proper SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation), as the term suggests, will enable search engines to find you easily when someone types in a search phrase that matches very closely with what your website offers visitors.
If done right, it can give you an endless amount of free traffic to your business website.
PPC Advertising: SEO Marketing provides traffic that is often called organic because it does not cost you anything.
However, if you want to get people onto your site quickly, especially while you're waiting for your SEO to improve (It takes time!), then Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is the fastest and easiest way to bring targeted traffic to your site.
This includes things like AdWords, Facebook advertising and anywhere else where you pay a set amount of money for each visit that ends up on one of your web pages.
Email Marketing: You can create your own mailing list to keep in touch with all of your customers (and potential customers) by providing an opt-in box on your website.
Email marketing is then a process by which you use a series of emails to your list with the aim of building a relationship with them, often by providing further free but valuable information.
Research has shown that it can take a number of such contacts for you to build sufficient trust with those on your list that they then choose to buy from you.
Email marketing is an effective and low-cost way to sell and should be a part of the on-line strategy for every business.