Particularly in today's economic climate many businesses will be looking for ways to advertise their services at a low cost. It is particularly important to promote your brand at the moment as any advantage that you can get over your competitors could really make the difference when it comes to survival. The paradox is that most companies will not have the same kind of marketing budget that they previously had in the more stable market in order to gain this advantage. Companies will need to start to think out of the box when it comes to solutions to this advertising dilemma.

In order to address this dilemma one of the first places to look should without doubt be the internet and with the ease of access of information that the internet provides. It is true that many websites charge substantial fees for advertising space on their pages, which for the most part proves to be ineffective. The problem with the lack of effectiveness of this advertising stems from the fact that these adverts are not positioned where the user would be looking for them. They may have prominence on the page but the user is not on the website to look at the adverts. Occasionally if the advert is designed well and draws the attention of the website user then some business may be generated. The overall effectiveness of this type of advertising is not good enough however as the user is not there to look at the advert but rather the content on the page.

This is where the use of testimonials can be effective as these provide genuinely interesting content that is appropriate to the person who is viewing the page. One way to do this is on your own website, simply devote a section of your website to allow customers of yours to leave comments about the products or services that you have provided. The best way to do this is to actually allow users to create live content which can be uploaded once approved to your website. The alternative is to survey some of your customers and select the best testimonials to upload to a page on your site. This may not be so effective as the website viewer is likely to be intelligent enough to realise that you have cherry picked the best testimonials for your site, rather than a random selection.

Another way to utilise testimonials to advertise your business is on central unaffiliated websites that provide review content. There are several websites out there that provide ratings and reviews for businesses, and there are now a growing number of classified ads websites that offer this as an additional facility.