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Advertising DOs and DONTs
© 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.workathomebiz.info/webposition.html
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:-)
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Mal Keenan is an established internet marketer of five years and owner of countless domains/websites including his very first http://www.freeadvertz.com To subscribe to his newsletter visit http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com or send a blank email to truth4u@getresponse.com
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