A common small-biz rule of thumb is to set aside 10 percent of total expenses for advertising.
Are Scrappy Upstarts really doing this? How do you promote your product, get your company and its great services in the public eye without spending a ton of money?
Pay per click is a familiar and viable option, that you might not totally understand if you’re just starting out.
Pay per click lets you advertise your product or service online and only pay for what brings consumers to your business site. If you put a pay per click ad on the Web and no one clicks on that hyperlink to come to your site and buy your products, you don’t pay for that ad. If they do click, you do pay.
Google AdWords is probably the best known and largest volume pay per click advertising program. It’s also extremely easy to start and it gives you total control of your advertising campaign’s budget.

For its Starter Edition just decide what you are going to say in your AdWords ad (it’s all text), go to the Google site and sign up, write what you want to say in your ad and note the ceiling you will spend each month. Your ad will appear next to the search results of relevant keywords (that you note) when someone searches on Google. You only pay for those who see the ad and click on to your site. And you stop paying when you’ve reached your stated budget for the month.
These ads appear along the side of search related results they can also appear on sites that have agreed to show google ad words, often related to the ad’s content.
While pay per click cannot guarantee results – no advertising can do that – what it can do is guarantee that you won’t spend more than you can afford.
Marc: Love your site - great stuff. I work with start-ups to help them get off the ground and flying. Just finished getting VC and putting a CEO in place in my last project in TX.
You’d be surprised how getting an overview of how the heavy-hitting hard-selling internet marketers sell can be very enlightening - lots of great ideas. I’m working on a new start-up with Tracy Repchuk who is one of those in-your-face internet marketers. She has a great book out and she’s putting on a seminar in Los Angeles on May 16-17. Check it out: http://is.gd/rq0h