If you are a small business owner of something like a hobby shop or crafts store and you have a very small budget, don’t think that you are left out in the cold where online advertising is concerned. The great thing about pay per click advertising is it doesn’t discriminate against budgets. You can start with as little as ten dollars per month.
If you are new to web advertising and not sure how to go about it, you can advertise without risk. Just set your pay per click settings to budget your daily and monthly ad spend. Start with $10 for a monthly budget and 50 cents or $1 for a daily budget. This allows you to test the PPC landscape to see if it will work for you.
Also, bid small for your keywords – like 5 to 10 cents per keyword. You may not appear on the page 1 of the SERPs, but you’ll still be there. Contrary to popular opinion, some people still do drill down the lower pages of the SERPs. OK, not many, but some still do. What you are trying to do is to reach those people who are in your target audience. If someone isn’t in your target audience then they won’t click your ad. That’s saving you advertising money.
Bid it right and you can make $10 go a long way. If you make any money at all on your advertising you’ll still be ahead of the game. And by testing the waters first, you can gain a better understanding of how to use online advertising without losing a lot of money.
Great post, great points. One other tip for small, local businesses is to use geo-targeted PPC. This way you can cover your local market with a very reasonable daily budget. We’ve had great success with this for several clients.
Melissa