by Tam Nguyen

I know you are going to find this hard to believe, but there were in fact quite a few flourishing and thriving websites before Google Ad words. I have an ominous feeling; I might be burned at the stake after this article. 

For those you out there who don’t know: PPC or "Pay Per Click" refers to text-based marketing, where companies/webmasters get charged by the click whenever a surfer clicks on their paid ads. Search rankings are usually based on bidding prices. These are usually designated on the engines as "sponsored listings".  Companies can bid on keywords or even whole phrases ranging from .50 cents to $50. Daily budgets can reached into the thousands of dollars. Even if you are not paying $50 a click for a visitor to your website, you need to realize that you are charged for every click, whether or not that surfer ends up buying your product or signs up for a newsletter.  I don’t know about you, but in this recession I don’t know how this could be a sound business decision. 

We stop all PPC campaigns including shopping engines at the beginning of the New Year, but unlike other New Year’s resolution, we actually saw this one through.  And like a smoker that has quit for six months, I couldn’t feel better and happier. 

There are plenty of other free and inexpensive Ecommerce Marketing strategies a company can employ rather than having to use PPC.  Here a few examples that we have implemented over the last PPC-free month:

• Affiliate Marketing
• SEO Optimization
• Blog Marketing
• Social Networking - FaceBook, Twitter
• Sponsorships
• Multichannel Selling - Amazon, eBay

A good knowledge of web marketing can make any of these tools work for you. However, true success will not be reached until the business owner stops looking at their company and their product, and focuses on the customer.  Internet marketing is all well and good for any ecommerce site, but none of these matters if you don’t take of your customers.