As everyone who is marketing on the internet knows, your business cannot possibly be successful if the people who should be buying your products or services don’t know that it exists. It is therefore imperative that you promote and advertise you business as much as possible, and whilst using ‘free’ advertising is the strategy of choice for most marketers (especially ‘newbies’), it is not necessarily the best one in every situation.
One reason why this is the case is the fact that, in reality, free promotional methods are not free at all. No matter how you promote your business, there is a price to pay in terms of either the money you are spending or the time that you are expending to market without shelling out any cash.
Another important factor to consider is that so-called free promotional tactics usually take some time to be effective. If you want to start pulling money into your business as quickly as possible, using advertising or promotional media that do not cost money is not going to be the best way of going about it.
As an example, many ‘newbie’ online marketers see article marketing as an ideal way of promoting their business, and whilst writing and publishing articles is one very effective way of promoting an online business, it is not perfect. For most people who start to write articles to promote their business, it is the first serious writing that they have had to do for many years, so it is a time-consuming process (the time-cost element again).
Furthermore, once those articles are published online, it takes time for them to drive traffic to the site which the article writer is promoting too.
In short, whilst sending visitors to your website using strategies like article marketing that do not cost money work pretty well eventually, they do ‘cost’ time and they don’t work especially quickly either.
Consequently, although using paid advertising to promote your business is obviously going to have a cost that is measured in monetary terms, it is often a price worth paying. By driving visitors to your website far more quickly, you start seeing a return on your ‘investment’ far more swiftly too.
The most popular form of online advertising is known as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and the purpose of this book is to examine and analyze exactly what PPC is, what it is all about and how to make it work most effectively for your business.
