What’s the most cost effective way to use that money? In all likelihood, it will be some combination of the five small business advertising ideas discussed later on in the article. But before we discuss the ideas, let’s talk strategy.

1. Niche Advertising
2.  Local Listings - i.e. Google, Yahoo & Bing Maps
3. Pay-Per-Click – i.e. Google Adwords
4. Facebook
5. Social Bookmarking – i.e. StumbleUpon & Reddit

Two Ways to Approach Advertising

Bear in mind that traffic directly from small business advertising doesn’t last. As soon as you stop advertising, the traffic disappears. Only about 1 percent of the traffic ever converts, so you’re typically spending 99 percent of your money on visitors who will never do anything for you. The market price reflects this reality, of course, but the more you can focus your efforts on that 1 percent, the better. Use these two strategies to combat the pitfalls of any advertising method.

- Ask for permission

Consider offering something for free in exchange for an email address. This might be a trial period, an ebook, or something else that would typically be proprietary. Ideally, it should be something that will win them over. You can then focus most of your small business advertising efforts on those who have agreed to hear from you, instead of wasting the money on the portion of traffic that will never convert.

- Think of ads as a focus group

Instead of using small business advertising as a primary method of capturing traffic, use it to test marketing strategies and ideas. The wide range of ad types available makes it possible for you to find out how certain kinds of keywords convert for you, and which demographics convert the best.

It also allows you to send instant traffic to a test landing page in order to see how well it works for you. This is great for split testing tools like Clicktale and Crazyegg. Using quantitative data as the basis of your small business marketing strategy is always a better choice.

Keep these two strategies in mind while you take advantage of the following 5 small business advertising ideas.

1. Niche Advertising

This is one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to your site. If you are familiar with your niche, you should already be aware of some of the online communities that revolve around it such as blogs, forums, and online magazines. The costs of small business advertising are typically lower on these sites because they don’t have large traffic volumes. At the same time, you couldn’t ask for more targeted traffic for your small business marketing, because the people on those sites are already interested in your subject matter. This is why the smaller the niche, the more bang for your buck.

If you aren’t already familiar with the sites you should be using small business advertising on, start doing some Google searches and talk to some influential people in your niche. Find out where they spend their time online, and exercise small business marketing there if you can. Sign up for an ad network such as InfluAds or BuySellAds. These ad campaigns can be very effective on a limited budget.

2.  Local Listings - i.e. Google, Yahoo & Bing Maps

One of the most cost effective ways for a small-medium business to target a local market is via online maps and yellow page type directory listings.

According to Google local searches are responsible for about 20% of all Google searches (that number climbs to about 33% for Google searches via the mobile Web). When you consider the fact that Google’s search volume for August 2010 was a little over 10.2 billion searches in the US alone, you can begin to appreciate just how significant the demand is for local content.

With local listings goal should showing up on the first page for relevant keywords on Google. Google will show up to 7 businesses in what they call their “local pack”. Getting your business to show up here is generally a lot easier than showing up in the natural SEO results using traditional Search Engine Optimization approaches.

3. Pay-Per-Click – i.e. Google Adwords

Reach people when they are actively looking for information about your products and services online and send targeted visitors directly to what you are offering. With Pay Per Click pricing and bidding, it’s easy to control costs-and you only pay when people click on your ad. With Pay Per Click you are also able to control where people land when they click on your ad. This allows you to direct people to your specific product or service page which will help increase your conversion rates.

If you plan to implement an SEO strategy Google Adwords is also a great way to test your theories. With Adwords you can have as many keywords and keyword phrases as you can think of. Run your campaign for a few months with a relatively small budget in order to test how your keywords are working for you. How many impressions, clicks, calls/emails and orders/new customers does each keyword get? Some might have a ton of clicks but if they don’t generate business they may not be right for you. Use the terms that work best for you in our SEO campaigns.

4. Facebook

Despite it’s massive popularity, low cost small business advertising campaigns are still possible of Facebook if you know what you are doing. Costs of 10 to 15 cents are not an unreasonable goal. Still, it’s important to realize that if you use it incorrectly, you could easily end up spending 75 to 90 cents per visitor.

The primary benefit of Facebook is the ability to display small business marketing ads to people who have already expressed an interest in what you have to offer though their Facebook profile and their online discussions. You can also narrow down the ads to be displayed to people in a specific location, of a certain age, gender, relationship status, job, and so on. This incredibly targeted advertising method is great for conversions.

Achieving low cost small business advertising requires a high click-through-rate. Highly targeted ads with great headlines and a well-chosen image are more likely to get clicked on, and the more clicks you attract the less Facebook will be willing to charge you for each one of them.

An extremely targeted ad can be designed to address a user specifically, and this ramps up the click-through-rate. For example, you can use the city name in the ad, or something else that the user has already indicated.

Give the small business marketing campaign roughly twelve hours and review the results. Pause the ads that have a high cost and adjust your budget to focus on the ads with a lower cost-per-click.

Since the ads are highly targeted, they are focused on a small group of people, and they will burn out fairly quickly. Pause the ads that start to lose their click-through-rate, and create new ones.

5. Social Bookmarking – i.e. StumbleUpon & Reddit

StumbleUpon can be a great source of traffic, but it must be approached differently than the previous small business marketing campaigns. StumbleUpon effectively allows people to “channel surf” the internet, so the attention span of the average stumbler is low. It’s not uncommon to get bounce rates higher than 95 percent and average visit times of just a few seconds.

The good thing about StumbleUpon is that all visits cost only 5 cents. This gives you a low cost opportunity to bring some traffic to your site. The other important thing to keep in mind is that people can vote on your page. If it gets enough votes, it can become viral and bring tens of thousands of visitors at no extra cost to your small business marketing budget.

Keep in mind that people are using StumbleUpon for entertainment. They are unlikely to respond to marketing-oriented material, and typically won’t provide their email addresses. Asking for an email address may even put them off. Aim to entertain when using StumbleUpon, and leave the sales for later. Approach this content the way you would approach linkbait. Don’t give them a traditional small business marketing landing page. Your primary goal should be to keep the user on the site, and your secondary goal to get them to up-vote your page.

Like StumbleUpon, Reddit ads have the potential to go viral. They should be approached in much the same way, with entertainment as a primary goal.

Reddit’s ad structure is unique. You can choose implement small business marketing throughout the entire site, or on a targeted subreddit. You then choose how much money to spend. All the money goes into a common pot, and the number of impressions you are awarded is based on the percentage you contributed. This brings some uncertainty to your strategy, but if you play your cards right you can end up spending as little as 3 cents per visitor.

Reddit has a very unique culture and a successful small business marketing campaign requires spending some time on the site to see what this culture looks like. If you can win over the community, however, you will achieve some striking results because redditors are some of the most influential people on the web, and they love to share new material.

Conclusion

These ideas should get you on the right track. Remember to approach advertising strategically and with an experimental mindset. Use it to test what works and what doesn’t. Most small businesses are incapable of sustaining a positive ROI on advertising alone, but there is no quicker way to ramp up your conversion rate, and sometimes you may find yourself turning a profit. Ultimately, it is a vital learning experience.

It’s not, for three reasons. You give up all control over your website, you may not, in fact probably will not, get the support you expect, and you may be left behind when website technology improves.

Here are the 3 reasons to avoid your webmaster hosting your site;

1. You Give Up All Control over Your Website
2. You May Not Get the Support You Expect
3. You May Be Left behind When Website Technology Improves

1. You Give Up All Control over Your Website
When you allow someone else to manage your website on their servers, you may find it very difficult to leave for another host. Your webmaster will have all of your files. You will not have access to the server to retrieve and move your files. Your webmaster may refuse to turn over the files, or charge a fee for releasing the files and canceling your hosting.
2. You May Not Get the Support You Expect
Large hosting companies have 24/7 support by email and sometimes by phone. Webmaster hosting cannot offer this kind of support. If you have issues with your email or website and need immediate support, you will probably find yourself waiting until someone has time to help you or gets your message.

3. You May Be Left behind When Website Technology Improves
Webmaster hosting operations do not have the resources that large hosting companies have to upgrade equipment as technology changes. If your webmaster hosts with a large company, they may be able to grow and change quickly. If they own their own equipment, expect it to become dated quickly.

The solution to this problem is to host your own website with a reliable hosting company. We like SiteGround.

This may sound difficult, if you are not familiar with website hosting. A web hosting service gives you the disk space to house your website, and the bandwidth, or transfer capability, to share your website with the world on the web. You upload your files to the web hosting service and the host makes your site live on the web.

While there are free web hosting services, these are usually an even worse choice than webmaster hosting. You will want to invest the small amount of money in a good web hosting service. Here are a few things to look for in a good host.

1. Support
This is probably the most important thing you require in a web host. Look for 24/7 support with a minimum of email support. Email and phone support is much better. Also find out if they have a support forum where you can get help from staff and other users. Live chat is a great bonus. Before you choose a web host, send some support requests inquiring about their services to test their response speed and helpfulness.

2. Disk Space
You want just the right amount of storage, not too much or too little. If you get too little you’ll run out of space quickly, but if you get too much you’ll also pay too much. Most sites need about 50MB of disk space. If you’ll be hosting images or downloadable files like ebooks, you will probably need more space. Consider what you’ll be putting on your site to determine how much storage you’ll need.

3. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is simply transfers of data to and from your site. This includes your uploads of files as well as visitors viewing pages, which requires downloading them to their computer. You will need more bandwidth if you offer downloads. As your site becomes more popular, your bandwidth requirements will increase. Before choosing a hosting plan, find out how much bandwidth is included and what will happen if your site exceeds its bandwidth allowance. Also check into the ability to increase bandwidth on your plan.

4. Programming
To be sure you can build and maintain the website you want, make sure that the plan you are considering supports programming languages and services such as PHP, CGI, MySQL and SSI.

5. FTP Access
One reason for not using webmaster hosting is that it doesn’t allow you to upload your own files and access them through FTP. This is the easiest uploading and file management method. Make sure your web host offers it.

6. Control Panel
Make sure the control panel, or user interface, is user-friendly and intuitive.

7. Web Statistics
Make sure your web host offers tools that let you see how many people visit your site, when and from where, and what pages they are visiting. This is important information that will help you improve your site.

8. Email Accounts
You want multiple email accounts, preferably unlimited accounts. You may want to set up multiple accounts for different people or job functions.

9. Uptime
This is actually probably the second most important element in web hosting. Most web hosts, including webmaster hosting, will promise 99.9% uptime. Research reviews and other information online to determine if this is true.

There are literally thousands of web hosting services available. The best way to find a good one is to get a recommendation from someone you trust. Failing that, search for web host reviews and look for good reviews from users. Take the time to choose a good host to take care of your site. If you webmaster is willing to help you pick someone then take advantage of it.

Starting with the New Year, try to achieve your goals of a high click-through rate in your email marketing campaign. These email marketing tips can help you get potential clients to not only open the email, but also click on what is inside.

1. Keep It Short
2. Keep It Social
3. Target Potential Clients
4. Make Your Point Clear
5. Include a Blatant Call to Action