One of the most effective methods of marketing your business online is using one of the many pay per click advertising programs such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Advertising, or Microsoft AdCenter. With these programs, your advert is displayed on the search engine results page for a query that you specify, and then users have the choice of clicking through to your website for more information or to make a purchase.
An example of this might be a florist who agrees to pay $1 each time someone who searches for flowers using Google clicks on their advert. Each time a user makes the click, the advertiser pays up, meaning that they only get traffic to their website that is interested in the product.
Of course, there are several drawbacks to this method of advertising. For example, there are cases where people who have no intention of buying a service click on the advert, which then costs money for no benefit. Another problem comes from the website itself. If it is poorly designed, or does not work hard enough to convert the prospect into a sale, then the money spent on advertising is wasted. A third drawback comes if the customer is not quite ready to buy, in which case...