Advertising is often considered a discretionary spend and often amongst the first on the budgetary chopping blocks at the earliest sign of hard times. It's treated as an optional luxury, or may be even a strict no-no for small businesses

However, advertising is a critical component of marketing, obviously a key parameter determining the growth and success of any business. The direct cash outflow that one associates with advertising, often without an immediate and obvious return on investment, is often the biggest deterrent to companies embarking on advertising campaigns.

Thankfully, the Internet has opened up a whole new world of possibilities in low-cost marketing. Search engine marketing - both organic search engine marketing as well as paid search marketing-- is now the fastest growing segments of marketing as more and more businesses understand the relative merits of this strategy. It must be realized though that search engine marketing is fairly sophisticated and dynamic, necessitating a significant investment of time and resources to derive its complete benefits over the long-term when it becomes really cost-effective.

There are other marketing and advertising opportunities, and that too for FREE, that the Internet offers. Social and business networking online is one such phenomenal opportunity for companies to market and publicize themselves, though one has to be tactful in how it is done. These sites facilitate the creation of active virtual communities with the members of these online communities feeding off of one another for personal and professional benefits. While attempting to take advantage of these free online community sites, marketers need to be cautious and ensure that they are seen to be giving value to that community as much as they are attempting to leverage.

The other great channel is the sites that offer free advertising, mainly in the form of online classifieds, though there may be sites that offer other forms of free advertising. Get online, post a highly targeted and localized classified ad, and wait for the responses-how simple is that! By making it so easy and free, these sites (there are a few good ones out now, including ours, ResponsePlanet.com) have rendered the size of marketing and advertising budgets irrelevant--- any company can advertise and attract its target audience.

Not only do these classified sites let you enjoy advertising for free, there are significant spin off benefits with some of your other online marketing efforts, particularly in organic search engine optimization.

So, I'd encourage all small businesses to take advantage of these great opportunities for free. Don't spam, but don't shy away from advertising yourselves either. I don't.

--- Jonathan Gropper

Jonathan Gropper is founder of ResponsePlanet.com (http://www.responseplanet.com), a community portal that lets businesses get considerable marketing mileage with free localized classifieds advertising. "Find the exact location that you want to target for your free classified ad, select the type of ad you are posting (job, real estate, etc.), and create your ad listing". ResponsePlanet is an open public forum, a thriving online community for voicing opinions, letting out rants, writing reviews & blogs.