“In Business” by Roland Millward

Most businesses now have a website and spend time and money on developing and promoting it. Such expense and effort will hopefully bring in sales and leads.
However have you thought about generating additional income from your website?

This can be achieved in a number of ways, some of them very simple and easy to do. One that springs instantly to mind is Google Adsense. Simply sign up for an Adsense account and put a small piece of code onto your web page and a Google Ad will appear. You will get paid by Google on the click throughs to the advertiser. You can also incorporate a Google search box and again receive revenue.

There are also banner ads such as Tradedoubler where you will get paid on the number of times a banner is clicked or if a sale results.

Amazon have gone a step further and allow other companies to sell products on their website.

I am sure with a little research and effort your website can incorporate some of these features. One word of warning though is to make sure that you do not distract from your main goal of getting business for your company or make the web pages look untidy. The extra income generated may not make you rich but it could pay the costs of running your website and more.

One of the many things that businesses may fail to recognize is how effective their advertising /marketing is.

The best way to find out is to test various methods on a small scale. Whether this is newspaper, Internet, telephone, mail or any other. Use an affordable budget for each method and try just 2 or 3 methods at a time. Monitor the results. Try changing the style or words in the campaign and see what happens.

If something is not working stop using it. The length of time it is used is unlikely to improve the result.
When something works well then increase to a larger scale run again keeping costs in mind and increase in stages stopping if it no longer works.

It is important that you maximise your spending on advertising and marketing and do not throw good money after bad. Keep testing your campaigns as good adverts, adwords, banner ads, phone campaigns can get stale and need refreshing regularly.