So you have an online store, but no one is visiting your site?

Given how many web pages and stores there are online, it's very unlikely that someone will stumble on your web page. Just putting up a web page is not enough to create sales. You will need to advertise.

Online Advertising Basics

Online advertising can be a very powerful way to drive customers to your site and create sales. The most successful way to advertise online is to have your ad appear on web pages that have content related to your product or service or a search with key words related to your product or service. You can choose the keywords that should trigger your ads to appear. You will not be charged every time the ad appears, but only when someone clicks on it. This is referred to as pay-per-click advertising. Since many other advertiser will be interested in similar keywords, you will have to bid more money, if you want your ad to appear more frequently. Bidding more will also allow your ad to be placed above other ads and make it more likely to be clicked by a potential customer.

If the keywords are popular, you will receive clicks even if your bid is very low. Most bids start at 5-10 cents. If you are spending 5 cents per click and if you know that 1 out of 20 people visiting your site will buy your product, you will be spending about $1 for every purchase of your product. A very targeted advertising campaign with the right keywords might improve your ratio from 1 in 20 people buying your product to 1 in 2. This means you can spend even more money on those keywords and boost your revenue even more.

Since it is not very expensive, it is worth experimenting with online advertising to see if you can boost your sales.

Companies Selling Online Advertising

Google has an internet advertising service is called AdWords. AdWords is a particularly attractive advertising service because your ads will appear on Google searches. Since Google has a significant percentage of online searches, you will have very good coverage. Advertising on search engines like Google is good because people are searching for something in particular. If you have the answer to their search, they are likely to click on your ad and buy your product or service. Google also puts your ads on their partner sites if your keywords match the content of the site.

AdWords has a great interface to manage your advertising campaigns and bids. The sign up process and adding additional ads or keywords is very simple and quick. Google also offers conversion tracking. This is code that you insert in your web pages to track if customers coming from one of the AdWords ads is purchasing your product or service. The tracking is specific to keywords. This means that if you know a keyword is giving you sales 25% of the time, you might want to increase your bid for that keyword to drive more traffic to your web site. Similarly, there might be keyword that are not creating any conversion. With conversion tracking, you would know that and be able to turn off the keyword.

Overture offers a very similar service to Google AdWords, but there are some significant differences. Overture's minimum bid is 10 cents, while AdWords is 5 cents. This might seem insignificant, but there are times when an ad would be profitable for you at 5 cents per click, but not at 10 cents per click. Overture has a long process to approve your ads and keywords. This can take anywhere from 2-5 days. This includes changes to your existing ad. Adwords has instant feedback about approval or rejection of a advertising campaign or keyword.

Even though there are some downsides to Overture, if you want good coverage of your advertising campaign on the web, you will want to use both advertising services. Overture ads appear on Yahoo!, MSN, CNN and a host of other large web sites.

Some of the smaller companies offering online advertising are FindWhat, ePilot, GoClick and SuperPages. With the success of Google and Overture, there are many new companies emerging in this space.