With the highly competitive internet market, a fledgling online business should adopt multiple and different advertising methods to promote itself to their online audience. Fledging online businesses, though, are not generally flush with cash, assume they can’t market effectively, and give up soon after launching if their audience doesn’t find them.

Unfortunately, they are right in one respect – this can be an incredible expense if set up incorrectly and left unmonitored. It’s not impossible to do on a budget, though. You can reduce your costs by making strategic decisions based on your budget, by diversifying the advertising efforts, and by monitoring which sources are actually converting into sales.

When undertaking a marketing strategy on a budget, its incredibly important for you to eliminate the ineffective advertising techniques, reduce cost, and still manage compete.

Here’s a few ways to do it.

Search Engine PPC Advertising

PPC, or pay per click, advertising has been available for quite some time now – but since it has been around so long, many businesses are using it, and that drives up the cost. Trust me. You should see the bid for “web hosting” on Google Adwords. You all would be stunned how much we have to pay just to get you to look at our site.

This is not to say, though, that PPC advertising will not work. Some niche companies will be able to be listed very high for a very low cost, and this method will work extremely well for them – but it is not so appealing to a highly competitive market/expensive general keyword. For a small business looking to capture general market traffic, usually, the cost does not justify the sale.

If you’re going to go with PPC and you don’t have a whole lot of money, do some investigation into the “nichiest” (I know its not a word, I just made it up) words that still apply to your business, and see how much they run. By really narrowing down your audience, you save money and can zero in on people that are really likely to be interested in your products instead of shooting blindly at the interwebs.

This can be a money saving strategy, but on the other hand, you may get a much lower frequency of display because the more niche you get, the less popular the keyword so you really have to weigh all the factors.

Google Adwords is still the it girl in this realm, so check them out first.

Buying Website Advertising Space

There are many blogs and websites that will sell advertising space on their site for a certain monthly price or for a certain number of impressions, and if you find blogs that relate in some way to what you sell or are sharing this can be a great way to get the word out about your online business.

Just make sure that the website hosting your ads actually gets a lot of traffic. The general rule of thumb is that your online business will receive approximately between two and four percent of the website’s traffic and obviously, the higher the amount of traffic they get and the more prominent spot you want, the more you will have to pay.

It’s also important to make an appealing ad that people will be tempted to click on, so even if you do your own site, you may want to your ad graphic professionally done.

Instead of buying directly with a specific blog, you can seek out advertising networks that act as brokers. Blogads has a number of categories to target advertising on blogs from baseball fans to lesbians, Click to Blue is a progressive advertising network for left leaning sites, Eagle Interactive targets those on the Right – you can see that there are a wide variety of networks at your disposal to make it easier to find your audience, so make sure to check them and browse what they have to offer.

SEO

Search engine optimization has become a necessary component for promoting an online business, and its especially valuable because its free if you do the work yourself.

SEO is really nothing more than targeting a few specific keywords on each page of your website, and making sure the meta-tag reflects the keywords you want. When someone searches for the keyword, your site will come up somewhere in the ranking – the more relevant the page and more popular your site, the higher in the ranking your site will appear.

This will reduce your need somewhat for expensive advertising if done well.

Check out Google’s Keyword Tool, which can look at your content and make suggestions for keywords.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry or site subject, and is a form of SEO in that it improves your search engine ranking, and can potentially be a good way to direct targeted traffic.

Most article submission sites already have a good page rank, and your article will tend rank highly in the search engines because of that (if you treat the article the same as your web site and think about the keywords and its a good quality article). This can drive targeted traffic to your site before you can successfully increase your page rank through other methods.

Two popular sites for article marketing are Squidoo and Hubpages, but be careful – many article submission sites have strict rules about original content and higher quality content, so this won’t be a matter of just prattling off something in 5 minutes with many keywords in it and a link to your site. Think of it as an extension of your site, and work on it with the same eye to detail as you would anything associated with your main presence.

A number of places also have rules against self-promotion, so remember when article marketing that the sites are looking for your expertise to give their readers additional quality content – they don’t exist just to hand you a free venue for self-promotion.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook advertising is a relatively new way to advertise your business. You can target people in specific areas or with particular interests on Facebook. It works in a similar way to PPC advertising except that you pay per 1000 views. It can drive some decent traffic to your site, but you should monitor it to be sure it converts.

Affiliate Program

If your online business has a product or service to offer, you could set up an affiliate program. This can be done through one of the many affiliate networks across the web, like Sharesale, or with software you install on your own site, like Post Affiliate Pro.

The benefit of having your own affiliate program is that your publishers do all of the work and advertising for you. They will write the ads and assume the cost of hosting them, and all you have to do is pay them a commission after they convert a sale.

If you retain a profit, this is a great way to increase repeat business – just make sure that you offer a high enough commission to attract the decent publishers, but not so high that you’ll get the spammy affiliates. Monitor your affiliates to ensure they aren’t spamming or doing anything sleazy you wouldn’t want them to do.

Social Media Engagement

You need to reach the people, and today, the people are on social media. While we touched on Facebook advertising before, don’t forget about Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, as well as discussion forums. The name of the game outlined in the first chapter of today’s Internet Marketing Playbook is engagement – engagement with your audience, engagement with your consumers, and engagement with your industry. Sometimes, all at the same time.

Businesses have personalities, and your social media actions give people an idea of what kind of company you are. Do not make the mistake of simply feeding advertising into your Twitter stream and calling it a day. Engage your audience, get them involved, take that corporate veil and rip it off while your hair floats in the breeze.

People don’t buy from corporations, people buy from people, and your persona is one of the main things you need to control and shape on today’s fast moving, highly engaged Internet. Your engagement with your audience doesn’t cost anything but effort and time.

Analytics

Before you set up any of these advertising or marketing programs, you should absolutely sign up with an analytics program. An analytics program, such as Google Analytics, will allow you to track where your clicks are coming from, including tracking particular campaigns, and you will be better able to decide to keep advertising in that venue or to move on to something else. A good analytics program is an absolute necessity with regard to keeping tabs on your advertising efforts.

Building an online business is only the first step in what is a very long (and often tedious) process of becoming successful. When competing with the rest of the internet, you have to have something that sets your business, service, or blog apart from the rest. Focus on your strengths and innovations. Ask yourself:

What do I offer that others don’t?

Decide what this is and exploit it mercilessly in your advertising. 

I read Web Hosting Talk religiously. It’s a great place to stay plugged in to the twists and turns of the web hosting industry. Since its inception, Web Hosting Talk is where the web hosting savvy come to dish and bitch, and anyone can learn a lot just by stopping by there.

Compared to Dreamhost and Lunarpages and Bluehost, we’re pretty small potatoes in the industry. Granted, we’re not that small – at the moment, we host about 1750 domains. But, we’re not some three-headed corporate monster driving the industry, we’re the little quiet guy in the corner humbly scooting along as we always have. We generally don’t advertise, don’t run around begging people to sign up for our affiliate program, don’t invest a $100 payback to bribe someone for a client, and we don’t send staff in to make fake reviews on forums, or create fake sites telling everyone just how great we are.

OK, once we paid money to be #2 on a Top Ten list for a week. I didn’t feel like buying the #1 slot and I was curious as to what it felt like to be on a top ten list. To be honest, it felt skeevy. I knew I’d bought my way on the list. It felt wrong.

A lot of the things in the industry feel all kinds of wrong these days (aside from the fact that there’s almost nowhere to get honest reviews and ratings of any host because nearly every ratings site charges hosts to be on there, and many hosts pay companies to plant fake reviews), and one of them is these allotments that are all over the damn place. I literally cannot stand them. It’s not even a jealousy thing. It’s just a disgust thing.

I personally will not offer a shared hosting allotment that’s larger than reasonable specs on a high end server – it’s a bald faced lie. It’s wrong. I don’t get how companies can do it. I don’t understand how on earth the industry has gone down this road, and a lot of the time I am totally baffled how customers can buy a shared hosting account from a company for $7 a month who’s specs outstrip the server that same company is selling for $200 a month and not have alarm bells go off in their head. It baffles me.

One of the most honest posts I’ve ever seen from a web hosting company was HostGator’s post entitled “Selling Out”, made the day after they raised their account allotments from “crazy to downright insane”. To my chagrin, they caved – to my admiration, they admitted they caved. They decided that they had to remain competitive, the top 5 hosting companies were offering things you could never hope to use, and even though they knew (and were telling you) you’d never used all of it, they felt they had to offer it. I call it the “mythical account allotment”.

It’s a ceiling that doesn’t exist. The number people compare to see what bang they get for their buck? In practicality, they’re essentially meaningless.

First of all, you’ll likely not be one of the 2% that uses a lot of resources. The vast majority of our accounts, regardless of what they’re paying for, never see more usage in space and bandwidth than would fit in a Junior. Second, if you are, your site is likely robust and will process a lot – and you will slow down a server because you’re hogging all the CPU and Memory before you ever get within eyeball distance of any of those allotments that these companies are selling you. They simply don’t exist. They’re not real. It’s a bill of goods. Disk space and bandwidth on these supercharged accounts are totally and completely meaningless. It’s a marketing technique, nothing more. It’s a marketing technique that works because people don’t know.

I think I’m just old school. I believed all that morality crap that they taught me when I was growing up – don’t trick people. Don’t lie to them. Don’t mislead. Don’t be dishonest. Do what you say you’re going to do – at the core of it, all of these account allotments that are being offered drive me crazy because they only work because of one person’s ignorance, and another person being willing to take advantage of that person’s ignorance.

I just hate that.

I have podcast sites serving 100 Gigabytes a month that the server barely notices is there. I have WordPress sites serving 35 Gigabytes a month that show up in my “Top Ten Resource Users of the Day” list. People don’t yet know that it doesn’t matter how many gigs they serve, and that it really is hard to pack files in a site in Gigs, that what matters is how much they process, and that can’t be quantified – most hosts won’t quantify it. You don’t know – you find out when you get the email from the host saying that they have been the sole determining decider that your site has to go (off completely, or to a server).

And your first thought is “But I’m nowhere near the Terrabye of Bandwidth!”. Yeah, and you were never getting there, either.

It seems unfair to me that popular sites get nuked based on something they cannot see, and that so many hosts deliberately refuse to define. We may be one of the only hosts that have chosen to define cpu, memory, and mysql usage per account in our Terms of Service. It seems unfair that “regular” users base their site’s health on how close they are to their bandwidth limit when that number is meaningless regarding how many resources they’re taking up. Sites don’t get shut down for serving too much bandwidth – they get shut down for using too many resources.

And that’s a number that NONE of these gazillion terrbyte $7 accounts will give you. You can’t see it coming, you can’t feel it coming, and there’s no way you’ll know until it hits you. You’ll think that you can because of those handy dandy graphics in your control panel telling you that you still have another three gazillion terrabytes left. You’ll be wrong.

So, we’re probably going to stay small because we’re not going to go there. To all the people rushing to get their $7 accounts with more bandwidth and disk space than my $600/m servers, we’ll be too expensive, too little for too much money when compared to the leaders in the industry, and we’ll continue to only get clients based on word of mouth because we’re all old school and don’t buy our way onto top ten lists or hire minions to post fake reviews.

Ok, there was that one time, but we didn’t get any orders from it, I swear.

I’m ok being old school – I’m ok just offering a good product for a good price, growing slowly because our clients tell their friends, only advertising by donating free sites to non-profits who kindly stick a button on their site, paying affiliates a token instead of a bribe. I’m very comfortable with the fact that what I say you can use, you can really use, and it’s not a deceptive trick just to get you here (and likewise, I’m ok when you go somewhere else because it’s not what you want and you’d rather pay a few bucks for a gazillion terrabytes of bandwidth you’ll never use). I’m glad that our bandwidth allotments are actually a good indication of how far you can take your site in this environment, in my opinion and in my experience.

The web hosting industry is, admittedly, an entertaining animal. I think considering what it takes to get to the top, I’m happy DrakNet’s existing quietly somewhere near the lower-middle.