Paid Listings

Paid listings can be a great way to kickstart your search engine results before your site can grow traffic organically. You can also use paid listings for marketing campaigns or traffic maintence. With any paid listing service, a well-done campaign can yield excellent results with a high ROI; a poorly executed campaign can cost thousands of dollars a day with no results. For this reason, it is important to monitor all of your campaigns closely.

Google AdWords are the ads that display when you do a search through Google, in the right sidebar. They also appear in strips and columns on publishing sites that host the ads. (This program is called AdSense.) You create ads that are displayed when certain keywords are searched for or come up in the text on a page. You bid on the keywords to determine your placement, and pay per click (PPC) for your ads. Placement is also determined by the performance of your ads and the quality of your landing page. Local businesses can do local and regional targeting on their ads to decrease their advertising budgets.

Like Google, Yahoo! Search Marketing allows you to bid on keywords for the sponsored and sidebar listings, also giving weight to the ad performance and the quality of the landing page. There are also fee-based options for those who would like to be added to the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Shoping (for products selling online), or Yahoo! Travel (for services like hotels and transportation).

Want to advertise on MSN or Live Search? Try Microsoft AdCenter. It expands the same types of basic services as Google and Yahoo! to the Microsoft Network.

Local Directories

With Yahoo! Local, you can create both free and sponsored Yellow Page listings for your business. They offer a range of basic and enhanced options, depending on your advertising needs.

Craigslist is one of the best free local advertising sources. You can list your small business and your services on your local Craigslist. You can also use the site to announce a promotional event or sale.

Google Maps allows you to add and/or edit your business listing for the Google local results. Google also offers advertising options, which get your business listed beside related map results.

Banner Advertising

If you have a clearly defined niche market, and you can create a list of niche sites with your same target market, consider purchasing banner advertising space on those sites. Putting banners either in the header or the sidebar on smaller sites in the same market can be a lot less expensive than advertising on larger sites, and drive in more appealing, targeted traffic.

On a larger scale, consider StartupNation as an example. Entrepreneurs need software and hardware, so StartupNation gets ad buys from nameplate companies like Microsoft and Dell. Entrepreneurs need finances, so StartupNation gets sponsorship from major credit card companies like VISA and Discover. These examples can be applied on any scale—a dog trainer can advertise on the local dog park page, and a cake bakery can advertise at a local wedding planning site.