Using your website as an advertsing tool - part 4/6

Paid advertisement on another website

If you are in the accommodation industry, you are in some luck here. There are some really good sites on which to advertise, which in general gives good return on interest. Generally we hear good things about sites such as wheretostay.co.za. There are also a couple of others.

In nutshell, you pay someone else to advertise your product on their website, pretty much like placing an advertisement in a newspaper or magazine.

Be very careful when making these choices though! Most of the time, you are convinced how worth your while it will be for you to advertise by spectacular amounts of hits or visitors to that specific website. Ads are often done as pop-ups. Those annoying things that open up just when you open a webpage or try to close it. Ask yourself - how often have you opened such a pop-up ad? Or do you simply close the damn thing!

The catch lies herein - irrespective of how many hits the site you want to advertise on gets - if it is not targeted for your type of business, product or service you are wasting your money! Site visitors may not necesseraly be looking for what you offer. They may be on the lookout for jokes, or video clips etc. And what do they get in the process? A virtual bombardement of pop-up and/or flash ads - often having NOTHING to do with what they are looking for! The result? They get annoyed and simply can't close your advertisement fast enough.

Website that generate a very large hit rate are often joke sites and sites where you can download video clips etc. Not to mention online cassino's and of course pornography sites. Problem is, you do not necessarily want to be linked to them, now do you. If the site is structured for your type of business - like the accommodation booking sites mentioned earlier, at least you will have the advantage that site visitors are already on the lookout for accommodation somewhere.

So make very certain about this fact - that the site you want to advertise on, focuses on YOUR type of business or product. Example - in the case of a small town like Machadodorp for instance, a website can easily focus on the town and immediate surrounds, and in the process boost the town as a whole. Thus it may be worth the while of any business in that town to advertise on it - or at least if the site is properly optimised and can be found in the search engines.