Buying advertising online is certainly a pretty guaranteed way to build up not only traffic on the Internet, but also your brand. And many times, building brand awareness is every bit as valuable as building raw traffic numbers to your website.

If you’re going to explore the area of advertising, though, you need to be aware of some basic terms. This is true whether you want to puts ads on your website for revenue reasons or whether you want to purchase advertising for your website.

Below are some basic terms:

• Impression. An impression is any single time an ad is displayed on a website.
• CPM - Cost per thousand impressions. When buying advertising on a CPM basis (or charging on a CPM basis), you are talking about a certain fixed cost for every 1,000 impressions of the ad.
• CPC - Cost per click. Regardless of how many times the ad is displayed, charge will be based on the number of times the article is clicked on. For the advertiser, this is good because they are only paying for an ad’s performance and actual clicks on the ad.
• PPC - Pay per click. The method of paying for advertising where the advertiser only pays when a user actually clicks on an ad. As you might have guessed, networks that pay on a PPC basis will be talking about CPC, which is the cost per click (see above). PPC ads are open to abuse because of click fraud.
• Conversion. A conversion is where the person clicking on the ad actually does what the advertiser wants them to do (buy a product, sign up for a mailing list, etc). So, the advertiser puts out an ad. That ad is designed to entice the person to do something. If the person clicks on the ad, they visit a website. If the person then does what is desired from them while on that website, that counts as a conversion.
• CPA - Cost per Action. Cost per action is where the charges are based on the number of actual conversions. Ads of this type are common in affiliate programs where pay is based on commission.
• Contextual advertising. This is advertising which appears in context with other content, usually using keywords to determine the ads. Google Adsense, for example, is contextual in that the ads that are displayed usually are related to the content they are displayed next to.

I have no doubt at all that we have a lot of business owners and marketing folks come by and visit PCMECH. Folks who could benefit from the large audience we have here.

If you are interested in:

• Growing your business
• Building more awareness for your brand

then I have an announcement for you.

PCMECH is now offering direct sponsorship opportunities.

This is an opportunity to turn the tides a little from being a reader of PCMECH to taking advantage of PCMECH to grow YOUR business and put your message in front of the thousands of people who come here every day.

In addition to the benefits I list on our advertising page, I will also highlight new sponsors on PCMECH with a blog post describing what your business does, your offer and a link to your site. I’ll introduce your business to PCMECH readers.

As an additional bonus, I will also include your business logo in our PCMECH Live streaming webcam feed so that our audience will be aware of your business and check you out for themselves.

So, not to get all “salesy” here, but I want to be clear what new sponsors can get here:

• Placement of your box banner or text link (depending on your package) on all pages of PCMECH.COM
• Your URL included in our weekly newsletter, sent every Monday.
• An introduction article here on PCMECH.COM to highlight your business to our audience
• Your logo rotated in our PCMech LIVE feed whenever we are on the air

This is new for PCMECH. Yes, we have had sponsors before, but never in a structured program like this. Slots are limited. I don’t know how long it will take to fill the available slots, but if this is something you’d like to do, I’ll just say the obvious…

Sooner the better.

For details, go to our PCMECH Advertising page.