How to Advertise Your Website
For an inexperienced person, learning how to advertise your website might seem like an impossible task. The average person looking to advertise their website is most likely not going to have a background in marketing, or even much Internet experience.
All advertising your website is scary, since most small businesses and website operators don’t have much of an ad budget at all. Spending a ton of money on an advertising project that doesn’t pan out can mean the end of your business. This happens all the time.
So when you set out to advertise for your website, be sure to look into the following avenues. These are the six most popular ways to succeed in Internet advertising.
First, a tip: the better you know your audience and your customers, the better you’ll do when it comes time to advertise. The tell a speaker to know their audience, so an advertiser should know their customers. Ask yourself the two following questions:
Who are your customers? What are your customers interested in? If you don’t have something of an idea about this, it is not yet time to spend any money on advertising.
Trade Magazines Advertisements
These magazines specifically cater to a targeted national audience. The focusing is all done for you. Believe me; there’s a trade magazine for everything. Let me illustrate my point.
Looking to target wild boar hunters with your new line of camo coats? Check out “Texas Wild Boar Hunter” or any number of other boar hunting specific magazines. I’m not kidding; there are plenty.
Prices in trade magazines vary widely. You can expect to spend between $40 for a small ad in back of a newsletter on up to $100,000 for the biggest ad at the front of the biggest trade magazines. This number also fluctuates depending on the magazine’s circulation.
The worthwhile trade magazine ads start in the thousands, so spending less than that is pretty futile. Don’t laugh at magazine advertising — depending on your website’s focus, your trade magazine ad could pay itself off with a single big order.
Promote Yourself at Trade Shows
How to Advertise Your Website
Like trade magazines, these shows contain a pre-targeted (though usually small) audience. If you set up a booth at a trade show and get a decent location, you could get hundreds or even thousands of eyes and hands on your products and promotional materials.
The big downside on the trade show circuit is the cost: a decent spot in a trade show can easily cost thousands of dollars. I’ve heard of people spending in the 6 figures for bigger booths at the bigger shows.
But there’s another thing to consider about trade shows: business networking. The other big thing that happens at trade shows are alliances with other businesses that can support you either with materials or promotion.
Should You Buy Newspaper Ads?
Here’s an example of a completely non-targeted audience. There’s no “type” that fits a newspaper audience — all people of all classes read the newspaper. The good side of this kind of advertising is that it gets under a lot of eyes because, as I said earlier, everyone reads the newspaper.
Newspaper advertising can be cheap, depending on the market and the type of ad. Expect to spend in the four figures for a decent ad that will get you any traffic at all. A newspaper ad is better suited for a local business with an actual store front, as opposed to a purely online website.
Advertise on the TV
This kind of advertising is easy to target (different times of day equal different audiences), but television advertising is one of the most expensive ad investments to be had. You have to pay for the spot, sure, but you also have to produce the spot. That’s where the cost really hits.
Honestly, advertising your website via TV is best when it is left up to big companies with billion dollar budgets. No one likes those annoying late-night ads shot by some business owner’s brother in law.
Marketing a website is a complex process, but if you stick to advertising venues that offer the most reward for your investment, stick to newspaper, trade magazines, trade shows and other forms of advertising that allow you to target your audience.