There are a variety of free ways to attract users to your site, but you may still find yourself turning to paid online marketing at some point. For instance, it will take a while for search engine optimization efforts to start bearing fruit, or you may find that the top ranked sites for your queries are immoveable. You almost certainly will not start out with a significant social media following or long email list. How can you attract new customers using your website in the meantime? You can pay to have your ads appear next to search content on google, bing, facebook, or twitter.

Why is search engine marketing powerful?

Building a customer base organically takes time and effort, though the users you reach will generally be much better potential customers. Search engine marketing is a way to "cold call" online users who may not have realized they were interested in what you're selling. You can reach a lot of people for little money (generally ~$1/click, depending on the industry), but the people you reach are less likely to be specifically interested in what you're selling.

How does search engine marketing work?

First, you'll have to create an account with google adwords. You'll have to write some ad-copy, which generally consists of a title and two lines of description about what you're offering. Then you'll have to decide what keywords people are likely to use when they might be interested in your site. If you've already done some search engine optimization, you may have already generated this list. You'll also have to decide how much you're willing to pay for a click. The more you pay, the more traffic you will get.

How do you measure the success of search engine marketing?

If you are using google analytics, you should be able to integrate adwords reporting directly with it. Then you can see how users who arrived on different keywords perform (in terms of bounce rate/goals) on your site. You can try out different keywords and see how they compare, and adjust how much you are willing to pay for each keyword based on their success (or failure). You can also try out different adcopy.

What are the challenges of search engine marketing?

The biggest challenge is to make sure that you're spending your money wisely and seeing a return on your investment. Though you can bring in users steadily, you'll still have to monitor the campaign and make sure that none of your keywords is significantly less successful than any of the others. You'll also have to keep track of changes that google makes along the way, and make sure you aren't paying for traffic you can't use, like mobile traffic if you don't have a mobile site or international traffic if you operate a local business.