How cheap is cheap online advertising?

Really cheap online advertising is usually not worth the time it takes to use it. Two exceptions to this rule are if you are a very small business and use Article marketing or Video Marketing as your source of cheap online advertising. Both of them can have enormous results if your work is done very well for a zero-budget effort and the work itself becomes popular enough for others to share with their friends or colleagues.

Otherwise, the benchmark that online advertising is measured by is the cost of Pay-Per-Click ads like the all-industry standard Google AdWords program.  I’m not saying that it is the very best online advertising to be had, but it is everywhere, usable by everyone, and should be considered as the ‘standard’ as far as effective online advertising.

Let’s say for example your PPC campaign costs you 7 cents per click on average to get a targeted prospect to your website.  Anything you can find online that costs less than 7 cents will be either untargeted at all, (like safelists, spam and traffic exchanges) or will be very slightly targeted instead. (Expiring domains, pop-ups, pop-unders, redirects, doorways, etc.)

If you do the math, you’ll see that none of these tactics at all will be as efficient to your wallet and especially your time as a well-targeted PPC campaign… They simply don’t deliver anywhere near as many sales in the end.

Advertising or marketing online is a rapidly moving world, so there may be new technologies that change this fact in the future. However, no matter what new tools get invented, it will be very difficult to approach the level of sophistication that one of the big three search engines’ PPC campaigns can offer.

In summation, cheap online advertising isn’t cheap enough. SEO takes too much time, article marketing and video marketing take too much talent and luck, and everything else that costs less per lead than PPC costs you more making up for all of the worthless leads.

• What is Online Advertising?