Marketing Your Home-Based Business on the Internet

www.allbusiness.com

The Internet has opened up a whole new world of advertising and marketing for home-based businesses. Instead of having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on expensive print campaigns or mailings, you can now reach a global audience on a shoestring budget. Here are some of the popular and cost-effective ways that you can advertise your home-based business on the Internet.

Internet advertising can be broken down into three main categories:

1. Cost-per-click, where you only pay for actual clicks or leads for your advertising.
2. Cost-per-impression,
often referred to cost-per-thousand impressions or CPM, where you purchase a set amount of views for your ad.
3. Set-price advertising, where you can purchase a specific amount of advertising for a given length of time.

Cost-per-click advertising offers small business owners great value for their advertising dollar. There are several sites that offer the ability to pay only when customers click on your ads.

Google AdWords is one of the most popular advertising venues for small businesses. With the AdWords program, you bid on keywords related to your business, and your text ad is displayed when Google users search for that term. You pay only when a user clicks on your ad, and the cost per click varies according to the popularity of the keywords you select. Google AdWords does not require a minimum purchase, and you can easily spend less than $25 for a successful advertising campaign by utilizing AdWords properly.

Overture is another leading provider of cost-per-click advertising. Overture, which is owned by Yahoo, displays ads on a network of major search engines and portals, including MSN, CNN.com, and, of course, Yahoo.

Cost-per-impression advertising is waning in popularity, but it can still be an effective way to advertise your business. These ads are usually in the form of banners or buttons, and are sold by cost-per-thousand impressions, or displays of your ad. This means that if you purchase 5,000 impressions, your ad will display 5,000 times. There are no click guarantees, which makes this type of advertising less popular than pay-per-click advertising options. Most cost-per-impression ad campaigns have fairly steep minimum buys, which also makes them less attractive to home-based-business owners.

Set-price advertising includes running ads in newsletters, text ads, "premier listings" in directories, and many other types of advertising. This can be compared to advertising in your local newspaper. You may be charged per line of text, or a set amount determined by the publisher of your ad. Newsletter publishing is a great way to reach a targeted audience relatively cheaply. (Newsletter advertising may also be sold on a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis, too.)