When it comes to online advertising options for a local business, there are plenty of choices that are open to you. Some of these options are completely free, while others will require you to spend some money and thus create an advertising budget. But one of the advantages of online advertising is that it is not as expensive as other methods, such as television or radio ads. It is also possible to very specifically target the audience that you want to reach, so that only people who have a high chance of being interested in your products end up seeing your ads.

One of these options is media buying. Now, many of you who are not familiar with online marketing terms may wonder what media buying consists of. Basically, it means that you will be buying advertising space on another website and paying for these ads according to different business models. Here are the ones that are the most commonly used in the media buying industry:

Fixed fee – You pay a certain fee to have your ad displayed in a permanent position on a certain website. This fee could be for a day, a week, two weeks, a month or even longer. Usually with this option, your ad is not rotated, meaning that it stays in one spot on the website for the entire time that you have paid for it. The costs will vary depending on the ad location as well as the traffic that the site receives. As such, the price for a daily ad on a site with a moderate amount of traffic could be as little as $4, while one on a site receiving tens of thousands of daily visitors (such as a popular news site in your city), a daily ad could cost you $1000 or even more.

CPM (or cost per views) – Here, you will pay a certain amount for every thousand visitors that view your ad. Every view is counted, so you will pay the same amount whether a visitor clicks your ad to go to your site or not. Once again, the amount you pay will vary on the popularity of your site, as well as the location of the site where your ad is put in. Ads which are displayed in prominent parts of the site tend to cost more.

CPC (or Cost Per Click) – This is similar to pay per click (or PPC) ads that you see on Google sponsored results. You will pay an amount for each person that clicks on your ad and is thus redirected to your site. Costs will vary depending on the site where you are advertising. They can be as low as $0.01/click up to $1.00 or more for each click you receive.

Tomorrow, we will explore more details about online media buying, such as which websites you can advertise on and the types of ads that you can create for your business.

Youtube is now becoming a major tool for searching online for breaking news similar to how twitter is being used.  For example if there is a news story people will most likely go to youtube to search for a video relating to this news piece.  Some people will use Twitter to search for information regarding this news piece.

A great way to use youtube to drive traffic to your website is to be the first to upload any breaking news to your youtube account and you will see a massive increase in video views on this video.  You can download the news video from any major news site as long as you mention where you got the video from in the description.  To drive the traffic to your website you can simply place your website link in the description offering a free gift to intice your youtube viewers to click on your link and give them a free gift to download in exchange they give you their email to help build up your email subscribers for example.  Once that user is on your website then you have a better chance of getting a sale if you are selling something or a service on your website.

You can also use it to build up your twitter followers by placing your twitter account in the video description.

Also once you have reached over 150,000 views on your videos you can then apply for the youtube google adsense partner programme and make money from your videos aswell.  Joining their partnership programme means you will make money from any advertisement that is shown on that page from youtube.  You will earn commission if a viewer clicks on those adverts.