Gone are the days of pay-per-click advertising and sponsored search results being the ultimate in online advertising. Today there are many more effective, inexpensive ways to market your online business without resorting to this type of advertising. While these types of ads are still very useful, they can also add up greatly. Making efficient use of social networking, affiliate programs, links from other sites, article marketing and email databases can save you a significant amount of money on your advertising costs.

While there are pay advertising opportunities on the social networking sites, you can also create fan pages and do other types of advertising there free of cost. Affiliate programs, where other individuals have a link on their site to yours, are great sources of leads. Affiliates are typically only paid a commission if those who click through from their sites actually make a purchase. You can also do reciprocal links with other websites that complement your product or service. By writing informative articles with back links to your web site you can also drive traffic to your site free of charge. Finally, email databases that can be made up of former customers or web site visitors who choose to subscribe to your list provide a willing audience of people who want to learn more about your products and services. All these ways of advertising are completely free or have very minimal costs, especially compared to the possible return they can create.

Another way to save money is by using a cheap, reliable hosting service.

Tags: advertising costs, online business

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.