If you want to burn your advertising dollar as fast as a big brand TV advertiser, then buy a few thousand impressions on a busy website such as Yahoo.
By my calculations, 10,000 impressions (individuals viewing your ad) costing $500, would be used up in less than a minute.
What is worse, less than 100 impressions would be viewed by Australians, with only about ten from WA.
Of course, you could advertise on a popular national website and burn your dollar at a slower rate, but at least your ad would be seen predominantly by Australian viewers.
However, if your customers are mostly in your immediate area, even this is wasteful.
So can small local firms advertise effectively on the web? Yes they can, but it takes a bit of work.
One local site, which receives hundreds of WA visitors a day, charges $100 for a month’s exposure.
This represents great value, especially when you consider the quality of the audience.
Once you’ve found a few local webmasters who will take your advertisement, the next step is to create your banner ad.
If you visit any of the major search engines, they provide extensive lists of banner ad production shops, many of whom will make a banner ad for near nothing.
The only trouble is, most are good at production but poor on the creativity front. If you see a really creative banner ad that makes you want to respond, chances are it was created by the advertiser’s ad agency.
If you are tempted to develop your own snappy banner ad, re-member not to follow advertising guru David Ogilvy’s timeless slogan: “The more you tell, the more you sell”.
Banner ads need to be kept short and sweet.
If you want to get smart you can download a banner ad tool from Rocketfuel.com that lets you create five rotating messages in a single banner ad.
Of course, all this takes time, but with over 200,000 WA consumers accessing the net, it can be a very low cost avenue to reach your local market.
