Doing business does not come free. There is always a cost to do business.  The trick is to weigh the cost against the benefit that you receive.  One of the most difficult aspects of doing business to determine is how much to spend on marketing and advertising.  Because of the nature of marketing and advertising, it is often difficult to know exactly how much return you get from each piece of advertising.  And if you think that you are getting free advertising or marketing somewhere, think again.  There is a cost that you are paying, not necessarily in dollars.  Many times it is your time, your involvement, or the sacrifice of other business duties.

However, marketing is necessary to increase the scope of your business.  We cannot do without it, because we always need new customers, new traffic, and new prospects.  Customers leave us through attrition on a natural basis, (they may move away or lose interest), so we must at least replace our lost customers with new customers, and hopefully increase our customer base.

This is true with online business just as much as it is true for brick and mortar stores.  For online businesses, we often spend our advertising dollars getting people to click on our ads, links, and pages to draw them into our website.  Therefore, we need to examine the cost of our marketing in order to use the most efficient methods to drive business.

To give you a more concrete way of the cost of various methods of marketing and advertising, here are some ways that I market my business, and what the goal of each method is:

1. Writing articles on Squidoo, Wizzley: Cost–my time, Goal–drive traffic to my website, and earn extra money
2. Creating separate websites: Cost–time, minimal money, Goal–drive traffic to my pages, and earn extra money
3. Blogging: Cost–my time, Goal–drive traffic to my website
4. Email newsletter: Cost–$40 month, my time, Goal–drive traffic to my website and store
5. Print ad in local hotel magazine: Cost–$180 month, Goal–drive traffic to my store
6. Affiliate program on Shareasale: Cost–Initial investment of $550, then 10% of sales, Goal–drive traffic to my website

I have tried various forms of advertising and marketing, and part of the decision of using them is where I want to drive traffic, and is the cost worth the benefit.  Sometimes you cannot determine that without a trial period.  But no matter what you choose, there is always some type of cost to doing business.

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Marketing and Advertising: Cost of Doing Business originally appeared on Writing Online on February 6, 2012.

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