When it comes to advertising your website, many website owners fall well short.

Website advertising on and offline can cost you significant dollars without any return. Paid adverting or banner ad’s on “well trafficked” websites are expensive and many times offer minimum or zero return.

The secret is to advertise to people who are buying. One fact that was brought home to me many years ago, was that people go on the web to learn and get free stuff. So use this to your advantage.

Typical examples of how advertising can go wrong is a website owner with a business (physical store) and websites that caters for the baby market 0 to 7 years old, the store has a excellent reputation in the multiple births and disabilities area. Running an advert on a long established and prominent Australia wide “baby market” website at around $1000 per year over 4 years has resulted in one sale and one hire.

It turns out the “ad” is a listing at the top of a section of the directory for those competing products, however the “ad” looks just like the free ones below it. Clearly paid advertising is not the best method of marketing for this situation, and a number of lower cost options would have produced better results.

A simple offline strategy that takes 2 hours per month produces $5-10,000 in extra sales every month, is the best form of advertising this owner does. But that does not mean that advertising for websites does not work.

So the moral here is spend time (and advertising Dollars) where your buying customers are “hanging out”

Until next time.

Remember There’s Hope in Web Advertising