Question:
I have a passion for hand building jewelry. I have beads, tools, and materials coming out my wazoo. I have occasionally sold a few pieces here and there and people seem to like my work. I just recently got this computer to know all of what's out there in cyber space.
 
 Well, to make a long story short, I want more information about advertising on the web, how to do it who to contact. I am clueless. Help!
 

Answer from John:
You have a few choices. No matter what you do, you should have a website with a shopping cart. The easiest way to obtain this is by opening a Yahoo store. Not only will you have easy to use templates to build your store, but you will get a shopping cart and you will be immediately included in search results on Yahoo. This is a good place to start. There are lots of other options from there.

Once you have a website, you will need to attract traffic to it. You can put some of your items for sale on auction sites and then let your new customers know that they can buy from you directly from your website.

You can use pay-per-click campaigns at Google, Overture; Find What, or others to receive immediate traffic. You can use product feeds from comparison shopping engines like Froogle, shopping.com, and others.

You can do your own search engine optimization to get your website listed higher on search engines. You can hire a search engine optimization company to get your website listed higher on search engines or you can buy software to help you optimize your website for search engines.

You can use user groups to let people know about your site. Sometimes you may have to do this in a subtle way because of the group rules. The more active you are on the Internet, the more people will be aware of your site.

One of the best ways to get exposure to the world is to sell on eBay. You have to be very selective about what you list on eBay because everything is not going to do well. Some things may do better during a particular season.

We have found that finished jewelry sells the best in November and December on eBay. You can generate new business from the ads that you place on eBay and that is what internet advertising is all about.

In conclusion, the least expensive way to advertise on the web is what is called organic search engine placement. In other words, a high ranking on search engines for free. Search engines like to see information on websites (content) and they like to see links to your site from other relevant sites.

Getting a high search engine ranking will take some time and effort but it can be done. If you want to be visible to the world immediately, use pay-per-click on Google or Overture (Yahoo Search).

Being seen on the world wide web is something that you need to spend some time at but the rewards for doing so are great.