Some special considerations should be taken in carrying out web promotion for small businesses, so as to have the greatest effect at relatively little cost. The best method of web promotion depends upon the small business’s target audience and budget, but the following provides some helpful guidelines.

The use of targeted promotion is especially important for small businesses. While large general-interest internet businesses like eBay or Ask.com might be content to advertise themselves to a wide range of international audiences, many small businesses don’t offer their products or services worldwide and don’t have a wide enough range of offerings for appealing to a large portion of a general audience. Three main types of targeted promotion include advertising on an entire web site which is targeted to the desired audience (such as a site about snowmobiling), advertising on a targeted area of a more general web site (in a search engine’s results for “snowmobile” or an auction web site’s “snowmobiles” section), or promotion on pages of a general-interest service which uses “cookies” or registration data to target advertisements (such as showing an ad to users of a free e-mail service who have checked “snowmobiling” as an interest on their registration forms and are located in the same state). If banner or other graphical ads are to be used (and hosted on the web site), using targeted promotion also saves bandwidth/transfer in comparison to a larger amount of untargeted advertising, which can save small businesses money on hosting costs. Promotion techniques that open the web site involuntarily (like pop-ups or incentivised viewing) use bandwidth the least efficiently.

While some major web sites (like About.com) require minimum deposits which many small businesses would consider unaffordable, others (including Yahoo and Google) have minimum deposit requirements and activation fees which are under forty dollars. Some small web sites offer promotion starting at a few dollars. Having a PayPal.com account, which can be opened for free, makes it easy and safe to pay for advertising on many sites which accept it. Contrary to some peoples’ belief, opening a PayPal account doesn’t require a credit card; confirming a checking or savings account makes it possible to fund and withdraw money from PayPal as well. Free promotion opportunities exist which small businesses should take advantage of as well, such as posting ads on CraigsList.org. Some town offices will list and/or link to local businesses on their web sites for free, especially in rural areas. Inexpensive web promotion and related services can be purchased on eBay, although research should be carried out to determine if the seller’s offerings are considered ethical and whether or not they could have any harmful effect on the small business’s overall web site promotion strategy.

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