When Sue decided to start a small bakery on the Eastside, she never imagined how expensive it would be.
Sure, she anticipated the cost of rent, equipment, and even insurance, but she never took into account how much advertising would be.
She figure a few flyers, flashy signs in the window and word of mouth would be enough. Back in the day, this probably would have been, but now unless you have an online presence, your business is pretty much doomed from the start. When she first realized this she wanted to save money and try doing this herself. She started, like most small businesses, with media sights and social media accounts in the business names. This worked at first but after a year she felt that she really needed to boost her business if she wanted to stay for the long term. She also wanted to attract corporate business for luncheons and events. She knew that if she could get their attention she could open up doors to continuous income. She came to the realization that she needed to invest money to make money. This meant hiring someone to design and maintain a website with updated information and catchy slogans that would attract this new clientele. If a office manager was searching for someone to cater a business meeting, she wanted her business to pop up in the first few choices. It would take time to build but as people browsed her sight it would show up more and more. She started out on page five of the search engines but over time slowly climbed the ladder to the first page. She found that a PPC fee schedule worked best which meant that each time someone went to her sight, she was charged a small fee for that.