Navigating the perilous waters of Internet advertising

Ever stared with envy at the traffic stats of a succesful website and wondered how on earth it's possible that they can boast 50 million hits a month (or some equally stupendous number). Traffic volume has become synonymous with revenue because of today's prevailing advertising oriented business models. The allure of spending money to get eyeballs onto your webpages can be overwhelming.

Pumping up hits is not necessarily something you need to do as a smaller business or startup - especially if selling advertising is not your main aim. And just as importantly, when you undertake marketing and advertising, it's important you understand what you are getting for your dollar.

First off, let's clarify something. The term hits is essentially meaningless. If you are considering advertising your busines or website online, and the advertiser talks about the number of hits they get each month then you must gain clarification on what they mean.

From the above definitions you can see that what counts are visits - hits mean absolutely nothing. Reputable advertisers should be able to tell you how many human visits you can expect. They should also not count bot traffic into your total views.

Assuming that you are able to find a program that promises sufficient attention from human visitors, the next issue is the quality of those visits. By quality, I mean you want people who are predisposed to using your product, enjoying your content or whatever. There are plenty of programs out there that will send more people than you can imagine to your website, but the vast majority of these people are literally page hopping for something to catch their eye. They don't want to read anything, learn anything, or spend more than a few moments on each page. Clearly this is not much value either.

What you want, are people who are genuinely interested in what you've got going on. Assuming your budget is limited, then you can't really cast a wide net either. Your marketing has to be focussed and lean. There's really only one way to do this, and I know your going to hate it - word of mouth!

The best way to run a kick-ass marketing and promotion campaign for a SME website is to create a buzz yourself. Do this by contributing to forums and communities. Become known for being helpful and knowledgeable. Be imaginative in how you go about letting people know what you can do. For example, offer something free and ask people to let you know what they think. Use their feedback as promotional material - nothing breeds confidence in a new site, like genuine, glowing reviews.

I appreciate, that this is easier said than done. It takes a lot of work and unfortunately, no small amount of time. But often, paying for advertising is almost like paying to take a short cut -it may simply not work. Think about it from the other side of the coin -when was the last time you clicked on an advert. I'll bet it wasn't that recently, if ever. This is because you visit pages because of what you can get from them - not from what they advertises.

One of the hardest things you can do is bite the bullet, put your head down and work hard at building a reputation. But, it's also one of the most valuable things too...