We're talking about your website of course. Are you one of the thousands of UK SMBs hiding your assets in dark, unvisited area of the worldwide web? Or are you thinking about what pay-per-click advertising could do for your business? Hopefully it's the latter, but a recent survey says that British businesses are effectively wasting over three billion pounds on websites that are hidden from customers. Time, cost and complexity are apparently the main fear factors, but it can take as little as 15 minutes to set up a campaign once you've opened an account.

Microsoft adCenter can help you reach potential customers and drive them to your site. (Try it now and you could qualify for £50 worth of free clicks!) It's an online search platform which serves ads across Live Search. The advice is start thinking like one of your own customers - what do you do when you're trying to find something? You go online. You click on an online ad for a site that potentially, can sell you what you want. So if a customer is trying to find your product, how do you get your website to appear in that customer's search?   

The report (Search Marketing for Small Businesses) is enlightening - you really don't have to spend a fortune and you decide how much you want to pay. You can track click-throughs and even conversions, and assess how successful different ads are.