Ever wondered how to get one of those short ads on the top or side of your Google, Yahoo or Bing search page? Those short pay-per-click (PPC) ads are related to the keywords you entered in the search field, and they circulate on a rotating basis.

The great news for you is that any business of any size can post those ads...and can get noticed!

How can you take advantage of this targeted ad placement? There are few key steps...

• A good PPC ad campaign starts with researching relevant keywords for your business. What will lead a customer to your door? What words or phrases will help someone find your website? If you were a potential customer, what would you type in to find a business with your products or services?
• Determine which search engine(s) you want to use for placing your PPC ads. Google is by far the largest and most well-known...which also means it has the most competition. If your business is in a small niche market, it won't matter so much. But if, for instance, you're one of the thousand coffee shops in a city, recognize that there's likely to be many more businesses looking for the same real estate you are.
• Once you've established a list of keywords, the next step is to create short, effective ad copy using those keywords. Before writing your ads, check the rules for the search engine you're using to make sure your ads comply. The emphasis here is on brevity: these text ads are typically short, so your copy should quickly give a sense of what you do.
• Next you'll need to determine your budget. Each search engine has its own PPC service, and most offer fairly flexible pricing. The pricing structure often involves a not-to-exceed monthly budget that you establish at the outset. You can often break down that monthly amount in a number of configurations: weekly, daily or some combination.

How does that work? Basically, each time a search engine user clicks on your PPC ad, a small fee is deducted from your budget. When your budget is exhausted, your ad is taken out of rotation until your budget is reset. For instance, if your daily budget is $10.00 and each click costs $.25, after 40 people have clicked on your ad it will be "retired" until the next calendar day.

Keep in mind that these ads are called "pay-per-click" rather than "pay-per-view". (That's a whole other animal...) Your budget is affected each time a user actually clicks on your ad, not each time the ad appears.

How can you know what the right times are to run your ads? Or how much your budget should be? Or how well your ad is working?

The secret to answering these questions is maintenance.

There is certainly a world of data that can help you determine the right budget for your particular keywords, but in this case there's really no substitute for experience. Each search engine offers analysis tools you can use to identify where and when users click on your ads. You may find that your $10.00 budget is exhausted every day by 2pm, in which case you may want to increase it. Or you may discover that your ad is never clicked after 7pm, so you may choose to eliminate later times from your PPC profile.

As you become more comfortable managing your PPC campaign, you can...

• Create a few different PPC ads and see how they perform over time, eliminating under-performers as needed.
• Tweak your budget to ensure the highest return on your investment.
• Change the parameters of your ads so that you can better target more likely prospects.

PPC ad campaigns can be an efficient and useful tool for advertising budgets of all sizes, and can help you reach the people who use your products and services.

Next month, we'll discuss spam: tasty breakfast meat or the Bermuda Triangle of your work day?

Since summer's soon winding to a close, it seems fitting to ask: how many former library geeks remember the Dewey Decimal System?

Bueller...? Bueller...?

The Dewey Decimal Classification (or "DDC" as it's called) is the basic system created in the late 1800s to categorize and organize public libraries. It uses an established structure to group information so it's easier to find.

In a similar way, bookmarks are a simple way you can organize information you look at on the Internet. On your browser window, you typically find a menu called "bookmarks" where you can create folders and save sites you want to go back to.

For instance, if you're looking for a venue to hold a wedding reception, you can create a folder called "reception venues" where you store those links so you can compare them and show them to others.

Helpful, yes. But what if you're visiting your mother and she wants to see the places you've found but you don't have your computer?

This is where social bookmarking comes in.

There are several websites that serve as portable bookmarking sites. These sites -- including Delicious, Digg, and Stumble Upon -- don't actually provide any content of their own, but instead, they serve as massive online libraries that store links that other people have saved. And because they're online, you can access this organized information anywhere you have browser access.

For instance, assuming you're still looking for that wedding reception venue, you can store your folder of reception venues on Digg so that when you're at your mother's house, you can log in to your Digg account on her computer and show her the latest contenders.

So, why is it called "social" bookmarking? Because with these services, you can store your own collection of links, and you can search all the sites that other people have saved with that same label.

Of course, one of the potential challenges of tags on a social bookmarking site is that your system of organizing info may not be the same as someone else's, so when you are searching those sites for information, it's helpful to use broad terms.

The benefit of these sites is that you can find information you might not normally come across. For example, if you want to find a wedding venue in Maryland, a regular search engine will yield a number of sites where you can book your wedding. But the same search in Digg will lead you to an article that highlights unique wedding sites in Maryland, which include everything from castles and mansions to inns and taverns. These are places you might not find in a regular wedding planning guide.

The lesson? You can personalize your browsing experience by flagging sites you may want to use later. And don't forget that search engines are not a perfect science; using social bookmarking sites may help increase your search results so you can uncover that hidden gem!

Next month, we'll talk about the joys to be found from blogging.

As postage rates continue to rise, it's more important for you to find less expensive ways to reach customers. So, why not join those businesses that are turning to e-communications to promote themselves?

The three most common e-mail communications are:

• Custom e-mails: For targeted customers, a well-crafted and personalized email sent from a high-ranking person in your organization can quickly open the door to a new relationship.
• e-Blasts: These are short, postcard-like pieces that deliver snippets of information, like announcing a holiday special, or introducing new hours or a new location.
• e-Newsletters: These pieces are longer and typically work much like a printed newsletter, with several short headlined articles and story-related graphics or pictures.

Remember that all of these items are delivered to your prospect's inbox, so it's important that you pay attention to a few points:

• It's all about who you know. Although it seems obvious, many clients forget that in order to reach out to customers via e-mail, you need a list of e-mail addresses. So, how can you beef up your mailing list?
• Add a sign up form to your website.
• Run a special offer for first-time subscribers to your list. For example, give newbies a coupon for a discount or BOGO offer, or enter them in a drawing for a chance to win a really cool prize.
• Include a "forward to a friend" link in your e-communications so your current subscribers can easily refer you to someone else. Once people know how great your email is, they'll want to sign up too! 
• It's all about who you are. Although often overlooked, the "from" address is the first thing many subscribers will read, and it can be the thing that will encourage them to open your e-mail. If you want the e-mail to have a more personal feel, you may want to use your CEO's email address there. If not, maybe it makes more sense to use a generic e-mail address like "info@...".
• It's all about knowing what to do.  No one wants to open an email that sounds boring... especially if it's from a company they don't know. Instead, try starting your subject line with a call-to-action. Verbs like "Read..." or "Act Now..." or "Join..." all encourage readers to get involved. And of course, don't forget to keep the subject line simple and short.
• It's all about getting by the gatekeeper. A spam filter is like a net that catches email which appears to be junk. The challenge is that each e-mail vendor's spam filters looks for a specific list of things, so finding a way to not get caught in any of those nets can be a major hurdle. The good news is that while each e-mail vendor has a different set of filters in place, there are some things they all look for. You can reduce your chances of getting stuck in "spam-land" by following a few simple rules:
• Avoid using these in your subject line: the word "free," a dollar sign ($), an exclamation point (!), or words typed in all capital letters. 
• Don't use a solid graphic image in the body of your e-mail. Instead, use a combination of live text and graphics.
• It's all about saying what you mean. Again, this suggestion may sound basic, but it's important to write good content that is relevant to your clients. By writing about topics your audience relates to, you'll build your readership rate (i.e., the number of people who actually open and read your email) and people will start looking forward to your emails.
• It's all about timing. Statistics show that readership rates for e-mails are the highest on Tuesdays and Wednesday between 10am and 2pm, so think about when you want to blast your audience. (FYI: Tuesday is also statistically the most productive work day.) It's thought that people are either too busy or too distracted at other times of the week to read non-essential emails.
• It's all about using the right tools. If an agency codes your e-communications using HTML, they're probably well aware of the fact that you can use only old-school HTML to build it because e-mail services don't recognize CSS. (If you're using a freelancer rather than an established agency, you may want to mention this to them.)

Another good option for creating a custom look for your e-communications is to use a service like Constant Contact or Cooler Email. These database services do everything from managing your e-mail list (for a small fee) to offering you a whole range of designed templates. With their help, even a novice can create a great looking e-blast without being a full-time developer!

E-communications can be an effective and cost-efficient tool to help you promote your business and connect with clients. So don't be afraid to experiment...

And next month, we'll discuss ways you can use viral online marketing.

So, is a picture really worth a thousand words? If the picture's on your website, it could be worth ten times that many.

Considering that the average visitor spends less than a minute on your website, the design of your site needs to quickly and easily communicate who you are and what you do. When you have a small window of time to say, "I am a friendly, thoughtful, customer-service-oriented business with happy customers," good quality images may be the perfect way to do it!

Including images in your website design is like hanging pictures on the wall: your house may not look bad without the pictures, but it can look so much better with them. Using imagery on a website adds color, breaks up monotonous text, and helps frame what is most important on the page.  And using photography to make the site look better means visitors will stay longer... always a good thing.

But how do you decide what images to use? And how much will this cost anyway?

There are a number of options available to suit any size budget...

• Smile! You can choose to hire a photographer to shoot some photos that are exactly what you need. If you make a specialty product or own some unique manufacturing equipment, or if your facility or your staff can be a draw for your prospects, this option may be the most effective one for you. A good photographer will provide you with a library of images you can use for your website, print collateral, annual reports and for a wide variety of other uses. (Just be sure to tell them what you're looking for, so you can get what you need.)
• "Today, the stock market stayed steady..." Another option is to purchase stock photography. And even here, there are two distinct camps: rights reserved and royalty-free.

Rights reserved images are photos that are available for sale by photographers or agencies. The prices can vary dramatically, but if you need a particular high-quality image for a specific purpose, it can be money well spent. Keep in mind that when you purchase a rights reserved photo, you're paying for exclusive rights to use that photo in specific applications, so the cost depends on how you'll use it. You'll need to specify the details of how, when, where, and how often the image will be seen when ordering.

Royalty-free images are photos available for sale by agencies and online vendors. These photos can be sold individually or in sets (for instance, medical or hospital imagery), and are typically less expensive than rights reserved photos. The image quality is still quite good, but because you're not purchasing exclusive use of the photos, remember that the agency can sell the same images to a number of organizations.

A friendly reminder: it's illegal to use any artwork (including photography, clip art, illustrations or paintings) without permission.

When it comes to photography, size does matter.

In imagery, the important thing to keep in mind is the resolution. Just like high-definition TV, the higher the resolution, the sharper the image will be. Resolution is measured in "dpi" or "dots per inch". The higher the resolution (the more dots of color per inch of image size), the better the quality of the image.

For your website, the image resolution standard is 72 dpi because that's the resolution of most computer screens. (If the image you have is a higher resolution, you can use a photo editing program to change the dpi.)

Remember... the images on your site are intended to entice visitors to stay a while, so think about what images will keep people on your site long enough to find out what a great company you are!

Next month, join us as we discuss some e-marketing options you can use to drive more traffic to your site.