7 Ways to Advertise Online!
Overview of this week's e-Newsletter
With such large growth in online advertising I though you might be interested in reviewing some of the options and opportunities to market and advertise online. So this week I'm going to go over a few of the well known advertising options and a few not so known.

The Many Ways of Advertising.
Some of the many options for advertising online.
Advertising on the Internet has really started to become a hot topic. With 72% of Americans using the Internet daily (according to a December 2007 report by pewinternet.org) there sure is a lot of opportunity to generate leads and sales. That means more Americans are using the Internet daily than they're sending text messages via cell phones - again according to this study.

So as you can see, online activity has become quite popular. And because the Internet is actually fairly new and still growing, I'd expect to see an increase in it's usage still. In fact, I recently discovered some new advertising methods that have just been developed. I've marked each of those new advertising methods with a red NEW. Well, I'm sure you're eager to read the list so with out further a due the advertising methods are listed below in no particular order.

1. Search Engine Ads - advertising with search engines is a classic but good method. Typically you can sign up for ads or as a sponsors (as some of them like to call it) and have you're site show up when someone searches for a particular keyword or phrase. Some search engines, Google for example, only charges you a fee when someone actually clicks on your ad to go to your website, which is a novel idea and great on the piggy bank.
2. Search Engine Optimization - this is the process of getting your website optimized for higher positioning for targeted search terms in a search engine.What's great about this is that you can get your website naturally showing up in the search results, where there is a higher chance of someone clicking through to your website. If you want more info on this we would be glad to help.
3. Facebook Ads (NEW) - for those of you unfamiliar with facebook.com, it's a website where you can link up with all your school buddies and see profiles of those you went to school with. Well, they just started offering and pushing advertising on their website. They have quite a large number of users, although mainly younger in age, but still you can reach a large crowd.
4. Blog Ads (NEW) - placing ads on specific blogs can help boost your sales or traffic to your website. The trick is finding the correct blog or blogs to advertise on.
5. Google TV Ads (NEW) - yep, recently Google just introduced a way for you to create and manage TV ads from an online platform similar to their search ads. Please note these ads are for TV shows not the Internet, so in a way it's not really totally related to this weeks topic but I though it was interesting enough to add in.
6. Advertise On Well Known Websites - many well known websites offer an advertising solution on their website. I've listed a few that I investigated.
   
   • Hotmail.com
   • CNET.com
7. YouTube.com Ads - YouTube offers commercial advertising and ad units on their website. You can select distinct audience or demographics view your ads, so it's quite interesting. You can check out more info at www.youtube.com/advertise

A Little More Search Engines.
More data on search engines.
With so much going on with search engines I thought it would be good to give you a little more data. Most advertising that's done on the Internet is through search engines, either in the form of ads placed on search pages or through optimization of website to gain higher positioning for search terms. Each search engine is a little bit different in their approach to advertising.

For example Google not only will display ads on it's search results but it also allow you to have you're ads displayed on other websites that opt in it's advertising ring. Of course as an advertiser can select not to have your ads displayed on these other websites. But it can be a good source for marketing as it widens your ad's market.

The effectiveness of search ads vs optimization is a good discussion. I've found that it really depends on how well the marketing campaign is managed setup and run. Although traditionally optimization will take a bit longer where an ad campaign can be started that day. But on the upside of optimization, once it's up and running you're good to go and should see a steady stream of visitors to your website without any cost per visitor and will typically send more visitors to your website. So on an effectiveness scale I believe it would tip more towards optimization.

Final Words
Ending comments
Thats concludes some of my thoughts and ideas on Internet advertising. I hope you enjoyed this week's newsletter and found some useful bits you can use in planing your next marketing adventure online.

And as always, look for next week's newsletter where we hope to provide you with more useful tips and advice. If you have any suggestions about topics you would like to hear more about please send us an email with your thoughts.