Online Advertising Options for Business Owners

Pay per click advertising is the fastest method of way to advertise products and services online. Pay per click advertising works by displaying a textual advert next to a conventional organic search result. The user is not always aware that a result may be a paid advert. This is because most textual pay per click adverts are semantically related to the user's query. Pay per click advertisers bid for any 'search term', in a never ending auction system. Contextual pay per click adverts are inserted amongst articles as inline links or as a video message. So web results and paid adverts are becoming more blurred, subtle and awkward to identify.

The traditional banner advert consists of a rectangular image, usually placed at the top of a webpage. Banners are designed to be eye catching, using a headline. Most utilize Adobe Flash multimedia technology Flash to makes the advert appear to move. Users are generally annoyed 'in your face' banner ads, that do not relate to the content of the page they are visiting. Consequently, click through rates are relatively low, giving advertisers a poor return on investment. In the early days of the Internet, banner ad swap networks were all the rage. They charge advertisers on a 'pay per impression' basis. Every time a webpage is loaded an 'impression' is counted. Unfortunately, banners got a lousy name due to click fraud and low click through rates. However, these days banner adverts and are more contextual in nature, displaying ads most closely related to user browsing behaviour. Some appear as neat floating popup's that glide across the screen.

There are thousands of 'business directory' type websites, providing online advertising opportunities. Most directories are categorized hierarchically by topic or theme. The largest of such directories is DMOZ or the Yahoo Business Directory. Users can 'drill down' and find what they want quickly and simply. The largest quality directories will charge you for a business listing. The benefits of advertising in such a directory, is gaining traffic from warmer prospects who click through to your website. There are also many niche directories, specialising in specific industry sectors. Beware that most smaller directories have only actually been designed to facilitate the purchase of inbound links by webmasters.

There are literally hundreds of online directories, to which you can submit your site to. Most of these directories provided have little qualified traffic back to your website. If you planned to advertise in such a directory be extremely careful that you are not linking back to a 'bad neighbourhood'. Most free directories require a reciprocal link as a condition of the inclusion. Qualify each directory you come across by asking:- Is the Directory old and established with many listings? If the directory has not been cached in a search engine, do not submit your website to it. Does the directory allow automatic inclusion of submissions, or does a human editor have to first approve each submission before it goes live? Only submit your site to directories where manual approval takes place. Is the directory vertically aligned to your industry? If so, it is more likely to attract your target audience and hence increase the click through rate. Conversely, general business directories are normally split into many 'off topic' categories, and will not provide an effective online advertising platform.

This is a terrific way of to attract your target audience to your site. Do not post your web address in any blog or forum related to anything off-topic. Make sure the topics discussed, closely match the key phrases and topics on your site. When you post, make sure your posting a unique and well thought through. Similarly, if you are responding to somebody's question, do it in an intelligent and comprehensive fashion. In other words, readers of the forum or blog will be impressed by your advice and are more likely to click through to your site.