Promoting your online business is the single most important daily activity of any serious website operator and if you neglect this fundamental area of your business you are doomed to fail. You may well have the most beautiful website containing a professionally written sales message and promoting a fantastic innovative product, but what good is it if nobody ever sees it.



So, what advertising methods should you use, how effective are they and do they deliver enough targeted visitors for your advertising dollar.

Searching Google for the term 'online advertising' at the time of writing this article displayed 288,000,000 two hundred and eighty eight million results. How do you find the best and most cost effective method, not by searching Google.

If we go down the old route and take the first result we find on page one, well, surprise, surprise, you will find that it's Google themselves promoting Adwords, their very own pay per click service. Using pay per click can be very effective and there is no dispute that it does generate traffic to your site but at what cost.

Lets say, you are promoting a low ticket ebook costing $7.99 directed at a niche' market and your conversion rate, that is visitors converted to customers is average, about 1% and each click costs you 8 cents. You will sell one ebook per 100 visitors, yet those visitors have cost you $8.00 and you have set your daily budget with Adwords at $10.00, the likelihood is that you will effectively lose $2.01 each day having spent $10.00 and gained sales of $7.99. It doesn't work, if you carry on like this you will make 365 sales per year with sales totaling $2916.35, but your advertising costs for the same period are $3650.00 equating to a loss of $733.65

Looking at another way that looms large in the above search results, Pop Unders. Pop Unders are those annoying little ads that tend to pop up when you are closing down your computer or leaving a website. Without going any further into this method, just ask yourself what you do with these. That's right you grit your teeth, curse under your breath and delete them immediately. All this means is that if Pop Unders and Pop Ups for that matter irritate you so much, isn't it reasonable to assume that most people will be equally annoyed by this intrusion, and if you are using this method your adverts will go the same way.

So you're thinking, I'll use Adwords but I will optimize my site to accept Adsense. Adsense is another arm of Adwords, it places adverts that appertain to the product you are selling or the content of your site, and each visitor to your site can click on these and Google will pay you a percentage of the revenue for that click. Sounds great, but lets look at the reality of it and the pitfalls.

Adsense is adverts on your site promoting products the same as, or similar to your own. Excuse me for pointing out the obvious here, but isn't there more than enough competition without actually giving that competition a 10 cents ride on your site and probably losing some of your much needed sales in the process. With Adsense, the adverts are always on your homepage and this alone places unwanted distractions and diversions under the very nose of the person you are hoping to sell to. That leaves Adsense pretty much defeating the object, so we can also forget that.

FFA, free for all, not much to say, maybe ten years ago, but being honest, when was the last time you went to an FFA page.

Click Exchange, this is mostly a joke. You are expected to surf your computer viewing sites that belong to other members of the scheme in order to build up advertising credits so your advert can be sent to everyone else. Do you have the time to sit at your computer clicking on site after site and staying for the obligatory 10 seconds looking at sites and products that hold no interest for you just so your site can be viewed by people who have no interest in your product. A little self defeating if not totally soul destroying.

Email, this was the bees knees 10 years ago, but with Government legislation, ever more efficient spam filters and the fact that you don't read any of your own spam before deleting it, then I suppose it's RIP email.

I'm sorry if I am pouring cold water on all your marketing efforts but surely it's best to be aware of the truth before embarking on either a costly or time wasting advertising campaign.

But hold on a moment, all is not lost, there is a new system. It's totally unbiased, it's free to try and it promises to make the difference to all our advertising campaigns without any unwelcome diversions.

It's the Search Sub Engine, it's a level playing field for all. Regardless of how large an advertising budget you have it's not favored by the Search Sub Engine. No Adwords. No Adsense. No Pop Ups. No Pop Unders. No buying Top Spot.

In short no favoritism, this is the only emerging system that warrants serious consideration in my opinion. I will be using the Search Sub Engines from now on, what they offer appears to be more business friendly in every way, especially towards your advertising dollar.