Advertising can be a hit or miss proposition. You advertise your product and hope that someone notices, likes it and buys. That is fine if you have a lot of money to spend experimenting with different methods and catch phrases, but for most of us this is just not a luxury that we can afford.

What do you do? Free Advertising? You try traffic exchanges, but people generally go there to get traffic for their own websites. Paid Advertising? You try pay-per-click, but that can be cost ineffective because just because someone clicks doesn't mean someone buys. You could try newspaper advertising, but then again, you've already paid and are not guaranteed results.

What a lot of savvy businesses have done is advertise via online coupon. This is an enticement for people to visit. If they visit once they could become repeat visitors and that is the Holy Grail for any business. The beauty is that you only have to pay if the coupon is honored. You don't have the expense of generating the coupon, distributing the coupon and finally the cost off the top of redeeming the coupon. You would, however, have to advertise the coupon...arghhh! You are right back in the same boat right...wrong. You can have millions of websites advertising your coupon in minutes. Sounds too good to be true right? What's the catch. The "catch" is that you must pay a portion of the coupon savings to the person who brought you the customer. But is that really a catch or just a justifiable cost of advertising this way? Think about it this way. If pay-per-click advertising worked this way, you'd only have to pay Google if they actually made a SALE for you, not a CLICK. Does it make more since to spend .30 per click or .50 per sale? That is the advantage of advertising using online coupons. You ONLY pay if they deliver. You can have thousands or even millions of people advertising your offer around the world in minutes.

Who offers this kind of service? There are local companies that will allow you to do this. One that comes to mind is Salt Lake City Sites (SLSITES.COM) or Richmond.com (in Richmond, VA). However, I've only run across one that will allow you to advertise worldwide and that is 4NiceOffers.com. You sign up as a merchant, create your coupon online, decide how much you want to offer the people who will be promoting your offer (yes...you decide this amount) and they begin advertising for you immediately. You could conceivably have millions of websites all over the world advertising your deal in less than a day. And you only pay if the coupons are redeemed. The only advice I'd give you is to jump on 4NiceOffers...offer...immdiately. They are relatively small right now and have plenty of room for merchants, but that will change as more people become aware of them.

This type of advertising makes sense. You waste money on advertising that is at best hit-or-miss if you pay up-front with no guarantees of success. Advertising using online coupons saves you money and guarantees success (you only pay if they are successful).

Yolanda McDonald is Business Systems Analyst in Baltimore, MD. She has 15 years of experience in programming, design and analysis on several platforms including Midrange, Client/Server and the Internet. You can find more of her do-it-yourself web design, programming and tips articles at http://www.ymcdonald.com, the site that caters to the poor sucker who got conned into building a friends, a churches or a small-small businesses website.

• Using Google Adsense in Your Newsletter Archives


• How Pay Per Click Search Engines Work


• Tips and Tricks to Advertise Using Pay Per Click Search Engines


• Google Ad programs


• How To Earn Advertising Revenue With Your Website


• Avoid Duplicate Content Penalty on PPC Landing Pages!


• How to Make Extraordinary Amounts of Money with Google Adsense


• Five Secrets to Effective Pay-Per-Click Advertising


• Pay Per Click - How To Optmize Your Landing Page


• Pay Per Click - How To Optimize Your Landing Page