Sponsored Posts or Advertisements – Which is best for your business ?

With the amount of businesses competing online for competition these days there is plenty of need to market your business if you want to be able to achieve success. Marketing your business is going to hopefully bring you a load more customers and therefore helping you to achieve a successful online business.

The reason many businesses decide to be active online is because of the amount of customers that can be found without needing to do too much work. However what happens when your website just isn’t bringing in enough traffic from search engine’s ? This is often the case for many people, especially with a small business which does not stand much chance at competing with big business websites for search engine traffic. This is why you need to turn to marketing online. There are two main ways t market your business online; the first is traditional advertisements for example Google Adsense. The second is sponsored posts on blogs like this one. Both of these have a variety of advantages and disadvantages and in this post i am going to tell you what you need to know about both of these.

Traditional Advertisements

For many years traditional advertisements in a websites header or sidebar have been appearing on nearly every website that you see online. They grab the readers attentions and hopefully persuade the reader to click on the advertisement and take a look at your website. With these you usually pay a fixed price for a fixed term of your advertisement appearing on a website if you chose to contact the website direct or you could pay per click with schemes such as Google Adsense. Traditional advertisements can be seen as really effective if you target the right market and have a standout ad design that people actually want to click on.

On the other hand some business’s are starting to turn away from traditional advertisements. One of the reasons is because many people are starting to use browser plugins such as AdBlock with means that your ad is not going to be seen and therefore you are missing out on a potential customer. Furthermore many people find these ads annoying and do not even look at them any more as they are so used to them that they just scroll past them without taking any notice so you really need to weigh up whether these ads are worth it. As well as this you are also not going to build a backlink from the website that you are advertising on.

Sponsored Posts

With the amount of people using the internet these days blogs are becoming a more powerful tool for businesses to market themselves on to try to appeal to blog readers and there are a lot of advantages of using sponsored posts. First of all you are appealing to the reader of the blog and hopefully they will click on your post because it is something that they are interested in any way. With a sponsored post you can use a lot more words to promote your business ans really persuade the reader that they need your services/product. Furthermore people are much more likely to read and have an interested in your post than just another annoying advertisement. The most important advantage of a sponsored post is the backlink to your website. Blogs are usually high-ranking and very authoritative in search engines and therefore getting a link from them back to your website is going to increase your Page Rank and help you rank above your competitors in search engines.

However just like advertisements, there are also disadvantages to sponsored posts. What if no-one clicks on your post ? You are going to get less readers coming to your website. Another disadvantage is that you are not going to have an ad appearing on every page like you would with a traditional advertisement.

It can be a big decision choosing the best marketing method for your business and is going to take some time to be able to see which one works best for you. I personally prefer sponsored posts but many people may disagree.