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.webpositiongolddownloads.com
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 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.
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