Understandably, there is shared frustration among small businesses over how to attract traffic to a newly built site. Unfortunately, visitors don’t come flooding in straight after launch and you need to work at promoting and advertising your website.

With so many advertising opportunities, assessing the options becomes quickly daunting and overwhelming. This article illustrates in point form the advertising possibilities available to website owners and aims to help decipher the differences between them.

Direct Purchase of Ad Space

Search Engine Marketing

Advertising Networks

Ad Agencies

This is by no means an exhaustive list of options for advertising over the internet but hopefully it has given you some guidance on where to start.

If you have a limited budget and seek a highly targeted audience, then dealing directly with publishers (websites with available or potentially available Ad Space) is a great place to start. Many marketers suggest combining this effort with a pay per click search engine marketing account.

If on the other hand you require a wide audience and you have a sufficient budget, then you may wish to employ and advertising agency to combine its search engine marketing efforts with ad networks and negotiating individual specialized placements to give you a broad reach. Whatever approach you decide upon, always test and track your campaign to ensure you receive maximum results.