Small businesses: Spending Your Advertising Budget Wisely
Posted by : Premraj | Posted on : Sunday, May 31, 2015
DELICIOUS
SU
REDDITThe purpose of setting up an online business is to generate enough of an income so that you can live comfortably from these earnings. There are fixed costs that are easy to budget for, such as cost of hosting and building a website. Advertising is a little more difficult to budget for; therefore it needs a different approach. Advertising is all about spending your money wisely, and ensuring that you do not spend money advertising to people who will never buy your product.
This can be especially hard when you consider small businesses waste 25 per cent of their PPC budgets. Thus, in order to be successful in business today, you need to understand how PPC (Pay-Per-Click) works and how to reduce the cost of advertising as well as cutting other business costs.
Hosting companies have even started to provide PPC services, as they are realizing the importance of supporting their customer and in turn growing their customer base. They also realize that as a hosting company, they are in the perfect position to provide a full service to small businesses (both blogs and ecommerce). For example, the hosting service 1&1 have broken down their packages depending upon the website purpose and size, and offer additional promotional services to suit each type of customer. Set up costs of a PPC campaign range from $49 – $99 and you can set up an ad spending budget from as little as $50.
Even if you are going to use a service like 1&1 to help with your promotion, it is still important that you learn about the basics of promotion and how it differs for an ecommerce business and a blog.
E-commerce Business
The best thing about advertising on the web is that no matter what size your budget is you will be able to buy affordable ads. On the internet you can bid for ads, meaning that you decide how much you want to pay. You can also set the maximum amount of money you want to spend on a daily basis. This means that you are in control and can spend your money wisely; buying only the ads that you can afford. One thing to be aware of is that if you bid too low then your ads may never be displayed. You will then have to decide whether you want to pay more but this will always be your choice. Search Engine Ads are probably the best option if you own an ecommerce website, as people are constantly using search engines to find where they want to purchase online and have a high conversion rate at 2% to 5%.
Blog Business
Generating an income from a blog works a little differently to doing so with an ecommerce business. The majority of bloggers earn their income from the ads displayed on their blogs, and with the right approach you can earn around $200 a day. The more people that visit your website – the more ads that will be displayed and thus the more income you will generate from your blog. Therefore, you need to spread awareness about your blog and keep people coming back. Social media ads are a great way to do this. You create ads that ask people to follow you and they get updated whenever you write something new, meaning you get a regular flow of visitors to your blogs. Social ads are also bought using the auction system so you will be able to decide exactly what you want to spend on adverts and on a daily basis.
