by Steve White
August 19, 2002

Advertising your web site can seem quite daunting to the inexperienced. Not because it is necessarily difficult, but because a mistake can have significant and detrimental consequences. If you have a limited advertising budget (everyone has a limited advertising budget), spending it all on an ad campaign that fails to produce results can easily and often does put many companies out of business. Advertising your onsite business is still critically important to many budding Internet entrepreneurs and marketers. I have avoided discussing it to date because I don't consider myself an expert and because the Internet is full of newsletters, articles and Spam email on how to advertise your site. Even so I have done my fair share of advertising from trade shows, magazines, ad agencies, banner ads and cold call telemarketing.

My first suggestion is to try to get someone that enjoys sales and marketing involved with your operation. Many entrepreneurs are specialists in a particular field. They are great designers, software developers, wine merchants etc., but not necessarily good promoters. If you don't enjoy it not only will you likely be bad at it, but you will also waste a lot of the time you could otherwise devote to the things that you are good at.

Whether finding sales and marketing help is possible or not, it is still important to have a good grasp of what is going on. Advertising can often be the single biggest expense you have. You need to know where the money is going.

So where should you advertise and how much should you spend? The answer; spend just enough in as many places as necessary.

It is a flippant answer but probably correct. I of course don't know anything about your business and I don't know how much you have. More significantly, getting this just right is the reason some people are multi-billionaires and most of us are not.