This is a question we get asked a lot, how much should I budget for online marketing, and in truth there is no short answer, it is more about using the resources you have in the most effective manor.

One way to test the water and see if you product or service has an online market place and customers who are ready to buy is to run a small Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, a few hundred pounds is enough to test the water in most cases – you can use any of the main 3 search engines for this as they all have their own PPC sections.

The accounts are simple to set up you can set a budget for the campaign so you know how much it is going to cost you and once you have the ad and keywords in place you should set up conversion tracking to monitor the results.

One of the best things about PPC advertising is that you can change the settings as the campaign runs making tweaks and changes so that you get the most from your advertising.

Once you have established there is a market for what you are offering you can increase your budget and continue using just pay per click or for a longer term strategy you can invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) so your site can be found easily in the search engines.

So the answer to the original question is as much as you can once you have proven to yourself that it works, using the conversion tracking you can see how much each sale has cost you and from there you can work out the profit per £100 you spend on advertising and work out your marketing budget from there.

Surveys are also a great way to discover what your customers think of the service you are offering and it is amazing the insight you can get on what products they were hoping to find.

Using this information you can target your advertising to the right market and can make sure that you are stocking products that these visitors want to buy, this will increase conversion rates and you can make more money per visitor.

Let me explain a little, you probably said that your competitors are the other people in your area who are selling the same thing as you, or the website that sells the same thing as you.

However when you are talking about on-line marketing this is not who your competitors are, your competitors are any website that ranks higher than you in the search engines for the terms that you need to rank for.

So it is possible that you are in competition with wikipedia and ebay, this is because to get your website and your products in front of your potential clients you need to be at the top of the search engines for the most relevant keywords.

How do you do this you may be asking, well the secret is good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) if you use good search engine optimisation and keyword research you can plan your march up the search engines and you can ensure that you are able to outrank your true competition at the top of the search engine rankings.

A few seats are still available to people who would like to book in for either the day seminar or the evening one, the seminar will be of interest to anyone who is interested in using Ebay for buying, selling or for business use.

This is just the latest of the seminars held at Cravenplan computers Salisbury.

John (Super) Birch

Chris Stanbury and John Birch from Cravenplan Computers were hailed as heroes today when they stepped into the breach at the last minute to give a presentation on Search Engine Optimisation and on-line marketing.

Cravenplan were invited to the event held by business link as attendees, unfortunately the guest speaker was unable to make the event and just fifteen minutes before he talk as due to start, the organisers of the Open advice and support day at The Olive bowl Gillingham asked if Chris, who is well known for the popular Search Engine Optimisation seminars he presents, would step into the breach and give the presentation.

The audience were treated to an hour of well researched and up to date information about SEO and on-line marketing and questions were then invited from the floor, and following the lively Q & A both Chris and John were available for one to one advice sessions that proved extremely popular.

You will learn

How ebay came to be the premier auction site on the internet

How to get the most from your listings

How to find items at rock bottom prices

How ebay can help your business

And much more

To attend the seminar on 12th March you will need to register at Free seminar Salisbury

With cash prizes given to out to a lucky attendee and everyone getting free books and notes from this informative and free seminar, the demonstrations of various aspects of the web 2.0 concept and the sites involved was exciting and a number of the business owners attending were shocked to discover they were already using some of the powerful ideas and applications that are considered to be web 2.0 strategies.

The free seminar covered a wide range of web2.0 aspects and following a lively Q&A session the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) team were on hand to discuss how these concepts could be put into use in business related websites.

The next free seminar at Cravenplan is on Ebay and this is proving so popular it is being held in the afternoon and also again in the evening, so if you have not already done so register for the free seminar Salisbury now.

Knowing this simple but often overlooked fact can help you be found more easly than if you are trying to compete for a competitive term, the results you get should also be more inclined to become customers as they were looking for your service in a given area rather than just randomly in the whole country.

If you do not offer your services in just one location it may be worth your while considering using 0845 numbers as these usful telephone numbers allow you to track where your callers are ringing from and you can then direct your marketing budget to where it does you the most good, The other hugh advantage of these 0845 numbers is that your customers only pay the same rate from where ever in the UK they call.

To answer this you need to consider a couple of things are you going to be conducting the on-line marketing and SEO yourself or are you going to be using a professional search engine optimisation company to get you the positions you need in the search engines.

Competitor analysis is one of the three golden rules that you need to follow to ensure your success on the internet with your website, the others being are there enough visitors for the terms you are promoting and are they going to spend money with you.

Depending on your level of experience or the skill of your search engine optimisation company your answer to the question “can you compete in this market?” will be different, some will only be able to compete against less well optimised sites with a low number of competing pages others will be happy to promote you for terms with millions of competing pages, finding the right level for you is the key.

You need a balance between the amount of time and effort you put into ranking for a key word compared to the rewards you are going to get from that keyword.

Remember follow the 3 golden rules and your chances of on-line success will be greatly improved, break the rules and you will be setting yourself up to fail.

Using Youtube to promote your business – You know that if you read an advertisment in te newspaper you skim it and only take in a little of the message where watching a moving image with sound makes it harder to miss the message and research shows that 55% of the information we take in is visual and only 7% is text.

You can use YouTube to demonstrate how products are used, this can save on paper if you are giving out instructions on your product or service, upload a video and direct customers to the YouTube page or as a viral advertising tool. Much like a blog by providing useful information you can show your expertise in a particular area. You can also use YouTube to promote products by making entertaining videos. A good examples of this are the Ford KA Sport Commecials.