Welcome to the show! I'm Anita Campbell, your host, and I am so glad you cold join us today for another edition of Small Business Trends Radio. The topic of today's show is "Creating Landing Pages to Turn Your Website Into your Own 24-Hour Cash Machine." Mark Widawer, an expert Internet marketer of the website, landpagecashmachine.com is our featured guest today. I'll be introducing Mark in a few minutes from now. Mark is going to be sharing with us how to create landing pages that will convert one advertising dollar into two profit dollars on your website.

But first, we have our regular Today's Trend segment. And Today's Trend is about advertising dollars moving online. For several years following the dot com crash in late 2000 and 2001, the advertising industry was in a major slump. One of the hardest hit areas was the online advertising industry. After an enthusiastic start during the dot com boom, the bottom fell out and online advertising limped along. Today, though, in 2006, the advertising landscape is much brighter. Trends are up, way up. For instance, growth projections for online advertising spending range from 22% to 37%. Over 70% of senior marketing executives expect to increase their online advertising spending during 2006, according to a report in B2B magazine. One of the online advertising areas with the greatest projected growth is paid search, meaning paying for small text advertisements that appear in search engine pages such as Google. In 2005, that was a $5 billion, that's billion with a B, billion dollar industry. By 2009, in another three years from now, paid search is expected to double to ten billion. Obviously this is big business. What does this mean for small businesses? It's a huge trend for small businesses. First of all, the cost of entry for buying these kinds of ads that appear in the search engine results, or paper click ads as they are sometimes called, is within the reach of small businesses. As a business owner, or marketing manager for...
[Listen to the entire podcast]