Online Advertising Options for Startups

There are so many different online advertising options out that there that I wanted to enumerate over a few we’ve experimented with and provide some simple thoughts. Here we go:

• Google AdWords – the most financially successful pay-per-click advertising medium in the world generates results but cost per lead has steadily gone up over the years
• LinkedIn Ads – very targeted, successful when you get impressions but not much volume unless you bid high or pay on a CPM model
• Social Networks – low cost-per-click but people are generally on them to socialize and not as much for business, though that’s rapidly changing
• Niche Community Sites – much more manual process to place ads but can be extremely effective to get in from of the right audience with a variety of different campaigns (sponsored emails, banners, download offers, etc)
• Retargeting – displaying ads to people if they’ve previously visited your site is powerful and cost effective (take a look at fetchback.com or the Google AdWords offering)

These are just a few online advertising options. My recommendation is to try several different ones and see what does and doesn’t work for your startup.

What else? What are some other online advertising options?