Advertising DO's and
DONT's
Copyright © 2003, Mal
Keenan
From early on in my online career
I realised that the fastest way to internet riches was to find a marketing
concept that brought me profits and plough as much as I could into that
resource, thus building my business and capital as I went.
For those
just beginning in home business marketing it would be prudent to start off with
a very small investment (I started with around $30) and try to build from
there. It would like to report that I was very wise after the first investment
but the truth is that the illusion of easily gotten riches lured me into a
spree of buying virtually every item of software/marketing resource that I
happened to feast my eyes upon.
Needless to say this is not the best way
to go about building a successful online career but the experience and benefits
I got from this initial burst of enthusiasm, in how not to go about targeted
advertising, far outweighed the financial losses. I have spent money on most of
what the web has to offer in terms of marketing and can now enlighten you on
what to buy and what not to touch with a 12 ft barge pole.
FFAs or Free
For All link pages were once a useful free resource and could have provided at
least a few hits per day given the right ad. Today using the free version of
these pages is all but useless and in my humble opinion a total waste of time.
The vast majority of people submitting to these sites today are using automated
submission software so human eyes WILL never see your ad and as far as I know
Automatons (Robots to some people) DO NOT buy products;-)
Paid or free
safelists from my experience are just not worth the effort involved. The very
fact that everyone posting to a safelist is not interested in the subject
matter but in selling their own products gives us some idea on the
ineffectiveness of this method. Couple this with the time spent sorting through
emails mostly for deletion you really could spend your time in more worthwhile
marketing ventures.
Moving up the ladder of effectiveness we have
banner advertising. From my experience the best banner I was able to design
brought me in a maximum of 2.8% click through rate and from what I hear this is
a GREAT %. Most banners will only pull a 1% CTR. If you can find a company
selling banner advertising cheap enough to bring you into the profit zone then
certainly give it a bash. Please remember though to track all your banner ads
otherwise you will not know whether you are getting massive click throughs or
none at all.
If you are going to post to classified sites then opt for
the free version. There is some good classified submission software out there
and may be worth the investment. Again ALWAYS TRACK YOUR ADS. For free
classifieds visit:
http://www.workathomebiz.info/adlandpro.html
Renting an email list is a good option and can bring you many hits to
your product or affiliate site. Make sure that the list is optin only, meaning
the people have requested to see your ad. There are many good reputable
companies out there and if you are willing to pay sometimes high fees to rent a
list, this can be a profitable venture.
Search engine submission is
definitely a worthwhile project and considering a good listing will bring you
daily and continuing free traffic I suggest you spend a bit of time perfecting
this method. I use Web Position Gold software to automate my submissions and
prepare my pages for submission. This cuts down in hours of work and I would
certainly recommend any budding business owners to get a copy. To learn more
about Webposition Gold visit this link:
http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=JE6-55C6
I have
also paid for a listing to Yahoo's directory. At $299 per year this may sound
very expensive to some but the traffic I have gotten from this listing paid for
the submission within a short period of time.
Pay per click advertising
is another good advertising resource to drive TARGETED traffic to your site.
First figure out how much you can afford to pay per visitor to your site. For
instance if you make a sale every 100 visitors and your product costs $20 then
if you paid 20 cents per visitor you would break even. The reality is of course
that you can get visitors for much less than 20 cents and I have many keyword
phrases that will send visitors to my site for 1 cent each. If you can find a
few good keyword phrases at a profitable price then you will do well. Two good
PPCSEs to start with and that I use are
Overture.com and
Findwhat.com.
Ezine advertising is by far the best form of advertising and more
importantly is reasonably priced. From my own experience a solo or top spot ad
are the most effective and will return more visitors for the price. For a good
list of ezines visit:
http://www.directoryofezines.com/
A word of WARNING
before closing this article: If you want to keep your business and your
reputation intact then NEVER EVER use bulk email advertising. It just isn't
worth the risk. The hassle that you will get from sending out unsolicited email
to 1000s of untargeted prospects will bring your business down in the long run.
There are enough forms of advertising listed here to keep you going for a long
time. Don't waste your time on unproductive and senseless SPAMMING.
I
wish you all the best in your efforts:-)
|
