Small businesses already use a lot of native advertising and may not realize that they are doing so. But, when you do realize you’re using native advertising, the following are the different ways that small businesses can make use of it.

Making Use of Native Advertising

* Search ads – On your website you can place a search bar that allows searches from Google to appear alongside your normal content.

* Content dependent ads – On your website you can place some code which will enable advertisements to appear based on the keywords within the content you publish. Sometimes they appear in a list and sometimes within the text (called contextual).

* Promoted videos – You can produce videos that you can pay to promote on various social media such as YouTube, Facebook and even Twitter.

* Sponsor funded content – Not only can you pay to place content on other people’s websites, you can also be paid to allow sponsors to place content on your website.

* Promoted images – Using Facebook and Twitter, you can pay to promote images that will help people find your website.

* Promoted commentary – You can either pay or allow to be paid to make commentary on an item.

* Promoted music – If you publish music, you can use YouTube to promote it further up the ladder so that your customers will see it.

* Other promoted media – Any type of media you create can be promoted up higher on the food chain using the promotion features of all social media.

Platforms for Native Advertising

There are two different types of platforms that participate in native advertising:

Open – You place the content on your website and then promote it to other platforms knowing it will send everyone back to your website.

Closed – Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are all closed platforms that allow you to put your content on them and promote them.

There is really a third kind, which is a mixture of open and closed platforms. In fact most advertisers are more likely to use the hybrid form of native advertising over either open or closed.

Small businesses can use native advertising by taking advantage of the platforms available to promote posts and get new readers such as promoting posts via Outbrain.com. This is a system that places your content in front of millions of potential readers on different websites. When a reader sees your title, they click through to read the content at your website.

Link to Outbrain – http://www.outbrain.com

Small businesses can also promote the content themselves through platforms like YouTube for videos, Facebook with promoted posts, and Twitter with promoted tweets. The platform you want to use depends on your budget and what you are promoting. You can also purchase keywords on Google Ads or Bing Ads to take advantage of other people’s content so that your ad shows up native to their content.

Using all of these methods to promote your content is important. As a small business, just placing the content isn’t going to get enough views to make a difference for your business. While SEO and prolific content creation will do a good job promoting your business, the fact is that there are so many different websites out there that are a lot of noise that you need to overcome to promote your business. Native advertising is a great way to overcome that noise.