Online Advertising Models

In addition to optimizing your website and increasing your site traffic through search engines, consider advertising on third-party websites and in search engines using a combination of banner advertisements and text links.

Graphical banner advertisements, pop-ups and text based ads are online ads that are placed on third-party websites that link back to your website. The ads are designed to encourage users to click through to your site to learn more and, ultimately, to buy. These ads can be set up for a fee – pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale – or they can be part of a reciprocal ad exchange with an online “partner,” where you place your partner’s ad on your website in exchange for your partner doing the same.

Paid advertising in search engines. Above, we mentioned briefly that some search engines offer marketers the opportunity to buy guaranteed search engine listings through the purchase of keywords. Google, for example, has a paid solution called Adwords – think of it as pay-per-click advertising in its simplest form. Google allows advertisers to bid for “sponsored links” – paid listings across the top and down the right side of Google's search results – on a per-bid basis. As an advertiser, you decide what keywords you want to “bid” on, how much you are willing to pay per click back to your website, and how much you are willing to pay in total per day – USD $1? $10? More? Less? It’s completely up to you.

Paid search engine listings are a quick, cost-effective way to get your site into search engines, without the wait associated with “natural” ranking.