Google Adwords is the king of search advertising. A whole lot of folks use Google’s pay per click system to reach out to prospects. But with the state of economy getting worse and small businesses feeling the pain of their cash strapped customers, many have to find other ways to spread the word around about their services without breaking the bank. While you should approach some of these services with care, you should definitely give them a try to figure out if they work for your business.

Google Adwords Alternatives:

1. Yahoo & MSN: this is really a gimme here. A lot of folks start with Google Adwords and then graduate to other services such as Yahoo. Others, start will all there engines. I personally like the first approach, but I have done it both ways. Sometimes, it’s possible to get much lower bids on these alternative networks, but they are getting competitive as well.

2. Facebook Social Ads: I have been critical of Facebook social ads in the past, but you can’t question the innovative technology behind the social ads. For instance, you can target 55 years old folks who are small business owners and live in the city of San Diego. That’s extremely valuable if you have data on your audience. You can also create a Facebook page and advertise that instead of your own landing page. Definitely worth testing.

3. StumbleUpon: Stumbleupon ads can drive lots of traffic to your site. Not only you get what you pay for, but if folks give your site thumbs up, you are going to get free traffic. I remember spending $100 for a week on StumbleUpon. I am still getting free traffic from StumbleUpon without me having to actually do anything.

4. LinkedIn Ads: Linkedin DirectAds are made for small businesses who want to spend money on LinkedIn to reach out to business professionals. Folks on LinkedIn do not play around. My conversion rates are higher on LinkedIn than Facebook, but I suppose it all comes down to your product. DirectAds is still primitive in comparison to Google, and you will have to pay on a CPM basis. But nevertheless, you get nice exposure among some serious folks on LinkedIn.

5. ClickRiver: Clickriver can be a goldmine or just a waste of time depending on your niche. I have used Clickriver successfully on my technology sites, but I have heard folks who haven’t had that much success in some other niches. Being able to show your ads below Amazon products is too huge of an opportunity for me to pass by. It’s definitely worth the try.

There are thousands of other networks and methods that you can use to buy traffic to your site (see here). But you shouldn’t spend all your fortune on these outside-the-box ideas. You should always test, test, and test some more. When you hit the jackpot, you know it.

Did I miss anything?

Let’s say you want to get into the Internet marketing game. You want to do SEO & PPC to dominate your niche. But how do you go about actually beating folks in each channel. Depending on the degree of competitiveness in your niche, the incumbent may be awfully hard to beat. But you are not really hopeless. First, you need to go through your top competitors sites (top 3) to figure out what is their search strategy (see the below two tools). The good thing about running a business on the Internet is that there is just so much information available on the WWW that you can use to your advantage. You can run sophisticated spying campaigns on your competitors. You can also carefully observe what your competitors are doing and try to do it better.

You will still have to go through your keyword research process, but by using the below tools you can figure out what keywords your competitors are using, and what you can do better. The concept is not something new. Many super marketers use the very same technique to enter and dominate niches at will (full disclosure: depending on your niche, you may have to spend considerable amount of effort and time to achieve dominance in your niche).

Search Engine Optimization & PPC

Once you have used your favorite keyword tool to come up with a list of keywords for your niche, it’s time to go and see what others are doing in your niche. You can use a tool such as SpyFu to figure out what exactly your competitors are ranking for, one what page. The page-keyword breakdown report is very useful as you can figure out exactly what keyword density your competitors are using to get ranked for what keyword on what page. This is powerful information that used to take so much time to dig just a few years go, but innovative spying solutions make it easy to dig up information in a flash. Linkscape by SEOMoz is yet another tool that you can use to dig up information on your competitors. Take our sister website, SEOABC. By feeding the URL to Linkscape, you can all kinds of information, including but not limited to links, domain data, and link juice for that domain (see below).

With the keyword report that you get from SpyFu and Linkscape you can figure out what keywords to target, and what anchor texts to shop for. With SpyFuKombat, you can figure out exactly what areas you have in common with your competitors and what areas you need to work on. Finally, SpyFu will give you the paid listings for your competitors which you could download and take a look at.

But knowing virtually everything that your competitors are doing, there is no reason to do something better and try to top them. It’s going to take some work, and nobody said it’s going to be easy. But a few years ago, you would’ve had to spend a lifetime to gather this information. Now, it only takes about 30 minutes. Times have changed indeed.

Your take: what’s been your experience with SpyFu Kombat and Linkscape?