What online advertising do you use?

Good feedback Harry, so can you track specific conversions/sales back to Google+ Local? Or is it more a case of general traffic?

Steve, It's more a trickle of leads I'm getting, nothing too major. But to be fair it's a free service and with a bit of tweaking I remain optimistic.

i am finding some website or forum to advertise for my business of our company, but dont know which one is ok.

Just wondering, how much was your budget for the googleads?

Offline alternatives such as newspapers, flyers, and business cards work really well when used together with online alternatives. You just have to understand them to a certain extent enough to be able to use them effectively.

I agree with Printbucket, it pays to have a holistic approach to marketing.

One of the best ways to advertise/market your business online is through content marketing. Why? Because:

1. It helps you build trust with your prospects and positions you as the expert in your market.
2. Search engines love good content and will reward you with high(er) rankings, and obviously, high(er) rankings means more FREE targetted visitors to your website.
3. It's free provided that you do it by yourself.

The only problem with this strategy is that it can be very time-consuming to produce the quality content needed for it. Plus you need to know your prospects better than they know themselves (what are their problems, what are their wants & needs, what kind of information they need in order to make an informed buying decision, etc...).

Compare content marketing to PPC (advertising method suggested by many on this forum) and you'll see the main difference:

- With PPC, leads stop coming in the moment you stop bidding for clicks.
- With content marketing, leads keep coming in years after you've published your content on the internet.

Just my 2cents, of course, you can still go out and blow your money on PPC and you'll probably get sales from that. However, if I were you, I'd bet my money on content marketing as it's much, much better marketing strategy in the long run.

By content marketing, you mean on site, blogs, articles forums etc?

This is obviously holy grail stuff, ie organic targeted traffic, but there's a good place for PPC, especially if you have a well tuned campaign. As long as PPC is bringing in conversions, and you are happy with the conversion rate, then use it as a tool alongside other marketing.

The beauty of PPC is instant targeted marketing. It's also a good way to test a set of keywords against content, making sure any required effort/cost is viable before embarking on longterm organic SEO.

Jut my 5 cents worth

Here's what I have in mind with content marketing:

For content marketing to work for you, and be one of your best long-term (forgot to add the "long-term" in my post above) marketing/advertising strategy, you first need to identify a "hungry" audience and then have a product/service that will "feed" them, meaning give your customers/clients what they want/need...

Then you use content marketing to gain trust with your clients/customers, and educate them how your product/service can help them solve their problems/make their life or business easier.

So, the main reason why I believe content marketing is one of the best (core) marketing strategy out there is because it adds tremendous value to your business in the long term. You gain trust, reputation, branding, etc...And the best part about is: Your (potential) customers/clients gain as well!

Then the rest is just a vehicle that will get your (marketing) message across to your target audience. A couple of examples of such vehicles would be:

- Google,
- Direct mail,
- Webinars,
- Seminars,
- Industry events,
- Catalogs,
- Kindle ebooks,
- Press releases,
- Podcasts,
- PDF reports,
- Whatever

As you can see, there is no need to limit yourself just to search engines (like google) to explore the power of this strategy...

Yes, ofcourse, you'll want to first publish all that content on your site/blog, so you can get free traffic from search engines as well (as you know, they love good, unique content as well, just like your customers/clients do), but then you can go one step (or ten steps) further and spread your useful content through other available marketing channels I've mentioned above as well, for even (much) better results!


When you have an unlimited/big budget, it is necessary for you to use all the available channels available, and fine tune your (PPC) campaigns (just like you suggest), but the original poster has "a small advertising budget" which means he can easily blow his budget on PPC if he has never done it before.

And that is why I suggested to rather invest his budget into content (marketing) and add value to his business, rather than just start a PPC campaign and hope it will convert.

Nonetheless, thanks for your 5 cents though! : )

You don't necessarily have to a have a big budget when it comes to PPC, I've got one campaign running that costs