Small businesses cannot afford to market themselves the way big businesses do. Rather than brand advertising, which takes a long time, small business advertising needs to bring in profits fast. Here are a few advertising ideas that will get you quick results.

Share an Ad Space

If you can’t quite afford a newspaper ad, you could split it with a few partners instead. Purchase a large ad spot in your local newspaper, then, split the ad with your partners. You will often spend less money than if you bought a smaller ad only for your business. You’ll also build relationships with potential partners and build a relationship with the advertiser, leaving room for more future deals to take place.

Try Postcard Marketing

Postcard marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways you can market your business. It costs just pennies per postcard and can often be extremely targeted. If you run a local business, you can mail just the people within a few miles of where your business is located. You could even mail just to certain people from certain lists who are near your area. Because you can target people so specifically using such a wide range of options, while spending just pennies per person, postcard marketing can be an incredibly effective marketing tool.

Facebook Pay-Per-Click

Facebook allows small businesses to target very specifically the people to whom they want to market. Unlike data you get for postcard marketing or other kinds of marketing, Facebook data is submitted willingly by users and likely to be much more accurate. You can expect to pay about 50 cents per click. You can target by age, location, gender, interests, marital status, income and a lot more.

Let’s say you own a local consulting business catered towards helping small business owners get off the ground. You might use Facebook to get new customers, first starting with individuals earning $30,000 or more, or you might target people between 25 and 50, whose interests include business. You would then write an attention-catching and informative headline and advertisement, along with a photo that really jumps off the page.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Customer loyalty programs have traditionally been very successful for small businesses. For example, for every ten slices of pizza someone buys, they get one slice free. This creates the psychology of people who come back for more, especially as they get closer to getting their free slice. If there are three pizzerias with comparable pizzas in the area but only one has a loyalty program, they are likely to go to that one instead.

These are just a few small business advertising ideas that can yield results quickly. Testing any of these ideas shouldn’t take more than a month or two and the results should be apparent almost immediately.

Of course, you must know about the existence of popular social networking sites such as Facebook. With its popularity, why not use it as a marketing tool? Here is the lowdown on Facebook ads and why they work.

If you haven’t visited Facebook, you should check it out. People have found relatives, high school chums, and college friends through the network on Facebook. You can create pages to be set up as a fan page for you, a forum-type page or some other idea you have in mind. What you want is to get your friends interested and then they can subscribe and interest their friends.

When you sign up for a Facebook account, there are many different points of information that you can provide. All of these searching tools are up for grabs with your Facebook ads. Best of all, the traffic is already there. Millions of people flock to social networks. And what you need to do is get their attention.

Here are a few steps to getting a Facebook ad going. First, create a page. You have to have a website promotion page, a fan page, or something else that is owned by you. People can come and visit and learn things about your website.

You need an ad that says what you want and need to say. Keywords are important here, but not the only consideration. Choose titles that are short and to the point. Use powerful and upbeat wording for the ads.

The really fun part is that you get to choose where you want the ads distributed. With Google ads, you can use relevant keywords to determine which search engine pages your ads appear on. With Facebook, you have many more variables based upon information that is gathered by the site.

You can get as specific as you want with these ads for maximum target ability. Not just demographics or gender is considered, but relationship status, likes and dislikes. These ads will appear on pages that are relevant to your niche ads. Your ads will also appear on your page for your fans and their friends to see also.

Now, on to the price. How much you pay depends upon what type of ad program you want. If you are paying per click, then you can evaluate how much business you are doing in relation to the amount you are paying for advertising.

You may not want to spend too much until you see how well your ads are doing. You will definitely get more visibility in a place where everyone congregates.

If you’ve tried Google, you should also give Facebook ads a try. You might be surprised at the results. They can make your advertising dollars work smarter for you.

If you want your business to get off the ground, you’re probably going to have to advertise.  For many companies, advertising becomes a huge chunk of the overall budget, but it doesn’t have to be.  There are plenty of free or inexpensive ways to let people know about your business and get them coming back.

* Email
Email is a great, contact potential customers, and keep existing customers up to date and coming back.  And while developing an email list may take some time and effort, sending out an email once you have a list takes very little time.

* Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is also a great way to get word about your business out there, and it generally costs you nothing.
The key to starting word of mouth business is not only to tell people to pass the word on to their friends, but more importantly, to treat the customer right so they want to spread the word.

Social networking sites are a great way to start a word of mouth campaign about your business. Sites like MySpace and Facebook. Then, if someone is a friend, the site will often automatically suggest they become a friend with or a fan of the same things.  Soon, you’ll have a bunch of people who are all fans of your business – then you can use the page to send updates to all of them about new products, services, and promotions.  It’s all free and pretty simple to get started.

* Blogs
Blogs are another way to get people interested in your products and keep current customers up to date.  Starting a blog is simple; there are tons of blog sites that will pretty much set the whole thing up for you.  The trick is actually getting people to read it.

You can use different SEO techniques including micro logs like Twitter, but you also need to provide quality content that people actually want to read.  Start your blog by not only talking about your business and ideas, but also those of other people.  If you refer someone to a good article or great deal, they’re much more likely to keep reading.
While you may decide to spend some money on your advertising, you can still supplement with these methods to boost your exposure even more.