Something every small company needs, is a good way to spread the word about their products and services. Luckily with social media, most small companies have found easier ways to reach out to more people. Unforunately ads and more specifically Google Adwords isn’t able to help you, unless your market is only your local community.

Because Google can focus on advertising for people who live in your local community, Adwords can be a very effective tool for independent businesses such as nurseries, bakeries, bars or basic services. It’s not as effective when you’re trying to, say, market a puzzle game to the entire world from the state of Oregon.

Thus I found myself discussing my proposed venture into Advertising with one of the Google Adwords ‘support people’ only to learn that unless I spent closer to $1500 to $3000 dollars a month we probably wouldn’t see any increase in traffic worth noting. Definitely encouraging for those trying to make an online business work.

What has worked for our business, at least in regards to advertising? We’ve seen significant increases with twitter traffic, Stumbleupon, forum posts. The best source of increase traffic comes from being mention on well-known blogs by people in the industry. We were noted on the Casual Gameplay Blog at jayisgames.com. The traffic we garnered from their post was better than most, because they people who came to play our game were actually interested in the kind of game we produced.

But it seems that advertising, at least for those on limited budgets of something akin to a phone bill, is not an option. Other bootstrappers out there…you’ve been warned.