If you spend money on marketing and advertising, you want to know if it is worth the cost. You want to know who is seeing your ads and who shows an interest in your goods or services. If you put an ad in a print publication, you don't know very much about who actually reads it. If you put an ad on the radio you might have an idea of who listens to the station, but there is no way to know for sure how many people are listening. However, if you advertise online you can determine exactly how many potential customers respond to the ad by going to your website and their basic demographic profiles, geographic locations, and how they found your website. You can create a way to measure with near 100% accuracy how your marketing dollars convert into sales. In other words, online marketing is the most effective and affordable way to measure your return on investment.

Let's face it, people use the Internet in every aspect of their working and personal lives. If you are not advertising online you are not taking advantage of all the resources available to you.

What Can I Do?

I know how to keep you from wasting your money. I can help you assess your goals and then manage your online advertising budget. I can create a system to know exactly what percentage of your advertising costs are converted into sales and then work on building that percentage higher and higher over time.

Advertising is expensive, and you have to be able to track your money and determine if the investment was worth it. Online advertising campaigns will give you the greatest return on investment and measurable results. There are many different ways of advertising on the Web as well as different payment stuctures. I can set up the most cost-effective system for your needs.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Some websites that sell you advertising space do not charge you any costs up front except for maybe a $20 one-time startup fee. This system is very popular on Google and the other search engines as well as social networking sites like Facebook.com. Your ad is rotated in an out of a given web page with other ads, and you actually bid against other advertisers to have your ad appear more frequently or in a better position.

Cost Per Impression (CPI)

This works a lot like PPC except you are charged for every "impression," in other words - every time your ad appears.

Cost Per Unit of Time

Some websites that sell you advertising space charge you on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis to have your ad always appear. This is very common with chambers of commerce and professional organizations who do not spend a lot of resources on frequently updating their websites.

Affiliate Advertising

There are also programs you can join that allow other website owners to place your ad on any other website. The way this works is that you pay a "middle-man" a set fee to make your ads available to other webmasters. These other webmasters embed your ad on their site, and if a customer clicks on this ad to buy your goods or services then the other webmaster makes a percentage of the sale. A good example of this is the Constant Contact ad I have on the Email Marketing tab of this web page. If you click on that link and buy the product (which is a really good product) then I make a cut of the sale and the advertiser gets a new customer.

One of the most powerful and unused tools available on the Internet is what is called a "RSS feed." RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." RSS feeds are usually designated by some form of the orange square you see to the left.

With RSS feeds you can push your website or blog content out to the web for other people to easily find your business' news. The RSS feeds can be converted into other forms of news tickers, widgets, and other web pages. For example, my wife's yoga studio website, YogaBirds.com, has an automatically generated RSS feed that sends her business news across the Internet. She can then place the feed within an advertisment or "widget" anywhere else on the web. Everytime she updates her website with new information, the headlines on the widget are automatically updated. Clicking on the widget takes you to her home page or any page of her choosing. An example of such a widget can be seen to the right.

People can also subscribe to receive your RSS feed in their email. Anytime you publish new content they will receive an email with the information. This is a free method of email marketing that I am surprised has not caught on yet.

RSS can be useful to all types of business. A restaurant might want to announce a new menu item, an attorney might want to inform clients of new and important laws, or a doctor's office might want to let patients know of new types of treatment. The beauty of this is all you have to do is write it one time on your website, and the RSS feed does the rest.

Who is Visiting Your Website?

Wouldn't you like to know data about the people visiting your website? One way to do this is to give your visitors a reason to fill out a form with their personal information. This can be a good idea - it gives you names and email addresses of possible future customers. But what about the people who don't want to fill out a form or give up their names? You can't violate your site visitors' privacy, but you can learn a lot about them - like geographical location, how long they viewed the site, what specific pages they viewed, and how they arrived at your site. In general, this type of data is known as "web analytics."

There are a lot of good web analytics tools available. One that I like to use is Google Analytics. For example, on my music website, www.burkeingraffia.com, I was able to discover that between Jan. 12 and Feb 12, 2008, there were 396 visits from 218 Cities.

I know the content people saw and the way they navigated through the site. I can narrow the data down to the timeframe of a single day. This information will become invaluable if I ever decide to market more of my music.

As a business, you need to be able to measure your ROI, and your marketing budget can only be validated with some sort of quantitative analysis. With Google Analytics you can set up goals and how many "conversions" of those goals occurred - like how many people filled out a form after seeing your ad or how many people purchased an item after seeing your ad.

A "Social Network" is a website that allows like-minded people to communicate and share interests. Through these websites businesses can create a page for free and market their businesses to groups of people. On your business' page you can post articles, news, photos, videos or music.

I can help you set up accounts and optimize the usage of these social networking sites, making it very easy for potential customers to find you. Some of these you will find very intuitive and easy to set up a basic account yourself, but I can help you further customize and brand the generic pages to look more in-line with your website and company style. The most popular sites that I would suggest using to spread the word about your business are:

• Facebook.com

Facebook is the biggest online phenomenon today. Millions and millions of people use this website to communicate, share media, and find out what is new and trendy. After creating a personal profile, you can set up a free "Page" for your business or a "Group" to which interested parties can voluntary join, keeping them updated with news and specials you might be having.

You can also create ads on Facebook that are a great return on your money. You can target specific geographical locations, age groups and gender. You can even create ads in other languages, targeting those people who do not speak English. It's a good platform on which to base an online advertising campaign, combined with web analytics and a little elbow grease.

• LinkedIn.com

LinkedIn is a bit like Facebook, but it is intended soley for professionals. You can post your resume, post a job, or network with others in your industry.

• Flickr.com

Flickr is a site where you can upload and share photos or video. If you have had a grand opening or special event with photos, you can post these media and "tag" them with keywords to let others find them. For example, you could post photos of your ice cream shop, tag them with phrases (e.g "ice cream" and "daphne alabama"), and all people who search for those words will be taken to your photos. After seeing your photos, potential customers can then be led to your business website.

• YouTube.com

YouTube is conceptually similar to Flickr, but only for video. It is a great site to host your videos, while then embedding the videos remotely on your website. This serves a two-fold purpose: 1. You don't have to use up your own web hosting space or your bandwith where your website resides, and 2. You can tag your videos as explained above.

• MySpace.com

I only recommend MySpace for musicians or bands. It is really simple to upload audio and video and to keep your gig calendar up-to-date. Since a lot of musicians use MySpace, it is a great place to network. MySpace is kind of slow and clunky, and the site puts a lot of unwanted cookies and ads on your computer.

eNewsletters are a great way to keep your business in the forefront of your customers' minds. You can send an advertisement, or coupon, or news update right to thousands of people's inboxes all at once. There are some free programs out there, but for a small monthly fee you can get a full-service product with lots of templates to change your newsletter seasonally or for special holiday. I recommend one of the best products, Constant Contact.

I can help you set up an eNewsletter with your own personalized template and teach you how to create textual and graphic content that has been proven to converrt eNewsletters into sales.

Another way of email marketing is to use RSS feed subscriptions by email. If you have a blog that generates a RSS feed, people can receive a notice every time you update your blog by publishing a new post. The great advantage of this is that you only have to write the information once, and then it is distributed across the web and into customers' inboxes automatically.