If you are anything like me, you’re probably fed up with having to deal with a boss and the typical 40+ hour work week. So you’ve probably decided after months of careful research to start your own business. You have a great business plan to guide you and your family and friends are behind you 100 percent. Now all you have to do is advertise your new business and let everyone else know how great it is.

Online Marketing is a Numbers Game

Online marketing is a numbers game that boils down to one simple rule:

The key to any successful advertising campaign is to reach as many people as possible.

You have spent a lot of time setting up your business so you know that it is wise to always do some comparative shopping before you buy advertising. Here are 6 things to consider:

• Online advertising is instantaneous: compare this to print advertising which has to be set up and scheduled, or flyers and newspapers which may take several days, or an ad placed in your local phone book that may not come out for months. Think about Google Adsense on your Hubpages. Those ads appear the instant you hubpage is published.

• Online advertising is more responsive: Consider that if you want to offer your customer a special discount: you can immediately add a coupon and adjust what you need to right on your website instead of having to wait for someone at the print shop to get around to it.

• Online advertising is not only cost effective...it is cheaper: Advertising online gives you more “bang for your buck”. Rather than paying higher prices for print work and distribution costs, you can use the money you save on advertising to add to your merchandise. You can also buy even more advertising online too. Google Adsense will allow you to place ads on their search or content pages that you only pay for when someone actually clicks the ad. How cool is that! An added bonus is that you will be helping the environment by not having to use paper products to promote your business.

• Online advertising can be interactive: Instead of a simple piece of paper you can catch your potential customer’s attention with audio and visual elements on your website. Audio and visual elements in advertising on the web invite customers to involve themselves to a greater degree in what you’re offering. You can create an emotional attachment to your message and what you are selling. Studies have shown that people buy mostly based on emotion more than anything else. Another benefit of advertising online is the ability to include additional information such as customer testimonals and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). On Hubpages think about the YouTube videos that people place on their hubpage to make them extra sticky. These elements also aid customers in making a buying decision.

• Online advertising is easily tracked: If you do any advertising the number one thing that you must do is track your campaign. Think Google channels. If you do any sort of print advertising, the only tangible means of tracking how effective your campaign is, or at least part of it, is to use coupons that the customers have to redeem. Even with that it is difficult to know exactly who is responding to any of your advertising. Online advertising is easy to measure and break down into very specific results. You can track individual sales, you can track which web pages have been seen ( Hubpage Stats ), there are even tools to allow you to determine what keywords caused customers to buy. Tools like these will help you to refine your advertising and put the right products or information in front of your customers.

• Online advertising simply works: If it didn’t then Fortune 500 companies would not continue to increase their online advertising budgets by 25% every year.

Just a quick note: If you liked reading this article keep an eye out for the remaining articles in this series. Also once the articles for this series are complete I will be compiling them into an ebook with more information, links and resources to be given away for FREE.