First, let me ask you a question: Do you believe that bigger is better?

Certainly the largest corporations in the world believe that, as they gobble each other up in takeover bids until all we are left with is two or three giant phone companies or suppliers. However, speak to someone who's phoned their telephone company recently to complain about the service and you'll often find the perfect example of why bigger is not necessarily better. Maybe you've done it yourself. Did you feel like a valued customer, or merely a record on a database?

Anyway, this is what shocked me. During 1999 I ran banner advertising campaigns on some of the most popular sites, as well as sites with only a few thousand visitors a month. I also ran text adverts in mailing lists ranging in size from 500 to 500,000. And guess what? The ads running in the smaller resources outperformed their larger rivals EVERY TIME!

Of course, the larger sites always generated more sales, which is what you'd expect. But, dollar for dollar, the smaller sites gave me a higher return on my investment - without exception.

I stopped to think why this should be the case and, after pondering over my experience with each advertiser, the answer became obvious. It was the key to doubling or trebling my profits (and now YOU can do it too). Let me explain.

My first campaign of the year was on a very large site. It had something like 120,000 visitors a month. I placed my order for 10,000 banner ad impressions, and 24 hours later receieved a reply from one of their advertising executives. They had a 2 month waiting list, so my banner would be run in April. I suggested a barter deal, and they explained that their advertising policy would not allow them to do this. Eventually when the banner was run, it yielded good results. I doubled my investment.

At the same time, I ran a small campaign on a site that received only 3,000 visitors a month. I emailed the site asking for prices, and 24 hours later received an email from the president of the company himself, thanking me for my interest. He was honest with me, and explained that since they were fairly new to the Net (his bricks-and-mortar business had been in existence for 17 years but they had only recently made the "great leap" onto the Web), they had not yet started to accept advertising, so he was unsure what to charge. I made an offer to purchase his banner ad space for 3 months, in exchange for cash and advertising space in my own newsletter. He accepted. The campaign was a great success, and my investment was repaid fourfold (after taking into account the fact that I could have sold my own advertising space instead).

Finally I compared the results of these two similar advertising campaigns... the larger site had doubled my investment, but the smaller one had QUADRUPLED it! Can you see now why I titled this article "Size Matters - And Smaller Is Better"?

So why was the second campaign more profitable? After all, the owner of the smaller site hadn't sold any space before.

Actually this was precisely the reason the campaign was so successful. Since their site had never receievd any advertising revenue before, they were grateful for ANY new revenue that came their way. I was thus in a position to negotiate with him a good price, which was a lot lower than the larger site would have charged for the same number of banner ads; and second, because visitors to the smaller site had not been exposed to banner ads before, the sudden addition of my ad to the site was probably something of a novelty to its regular visitors... no doubt improving the number of click-thrus.

I also got to negotiate directly with the president of the company, and was able to barter some of my own ad space with him, thus lowering my advertising costs. Try doing this with a marketing executive at Yahoo! and see how far you get!

The same thing happened when I advertised in e-newsletters. The smaller publications were much more flexible on price, and their owners were only too happy to discuss barter deals with me, cutting my overall advertising costs in half.

So what did I learn? As in the case of David and Goliath, bigger does NOT necessarily mean better. Instead of spending your advertising dollars on the large sites, why not find a selection of smaller sites, and spend your money there instead? They will be grateful for the advertising revenue, and you'll be able to negotiate a much better deal with them, with the result that your profits may increase dramatically. In my case, after I shifted the bulk of my advertising to the smaller sites, my profits doubled!

So how do you go about finding new sites with which to advertise? To get you started, here's three places you could try:

• http://dir.yahoo.com/new/
• http://www.netscape.com/home/whats-new.html
• http://www.whatsnu.com

To find more, just go to your favourite search engine and see if they have a "What's New" link. If not, type in "what's new" in the search box.

Once you have found several suitable sites, email the owner and ask for prices and site statistics (ie. how many visitors they are getting to which pages).

Try negotiating - you'll find that small business owners are in a position to be VERY flexible! Offer barter deals when you can. Especially when you are working to a tight budget you'll soon discover that, in the world of internet advertising, small can be - and often is - much better.