What is Online Advertising?

It may never occur to you what online advertising actually is. It sounds silly, but it’s quite common. So what is online advertising, exactly?

Definition of online advertising

The question sounds easy enough to answer, but it needs to be carefully considered… The world of online advertising has gotten too big and twisted that it’s easy for the central meaning to be obscured, especially when searching for the best form of cheap online advertising.

Online advertising itself could refer to any one of hundreds of different methods to get your message out by using the internet. Literally, there are many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of ways to do it, and the best online advertising campaigns will use many of those methods at the same time.

For instance, you’d have a website, which doesn’t advertise you as much as it does work for you, like take orders or at the very least convert prospects from the offline world into customers by convincing them to pick up the phone and call you.

Best online advertising, or not?

The most common type of Advertising online these days, if I had to pick just one, would be Pay-Per-Click ads, such as the Google Adwords program. That’s where you pay google per led to your website, say, $0.10 cents for example. If your website is good at what it is supposed to do and gets enough people to buy your product to be worth the money you’re spending on those 10 cent clicks, then you might not ever need any other form of online advertising. 

But that’s the lazy way. One should never just use PPC advertising, or for that matter I wouldn’t even recommend it for all types of businesses. Advertising or marketing online will always be a matter of getting leads to your site for as little money as possible, and believe it or not, many of the best methods can be done for absolutely no cost whatsoever.

Cheap online advertising

Take article marketing for instance. Since you know your business better than most, it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to write a 400-750 word article on something of interest in your market and have someone like a professional internet marketing firm submit it to all the best publications that would have it.

Excepting for their fee, that’s a completely free option, as in no ongoing cost. Some business owners even do it themselves and skip that cost. But how valuable is the advertising that earns them? Priceless. If an article with your name and website location is listed at the bottom of it is published in many related publications, you could literally see thousands of visitors from the one article alone, maybe even millions, depending on the size of your market.

Advertising and marketing online with articles

Article marketing is only one of the most classic examples of online advertising of course, there are so many other good ones out there that it’s hard to keep track. Video marketing, podcasting, newsletter ads, traffic exchanges, banner ads, the list goes on… The best online advertising campaigns use them all at the same time, and so should you.