The number one reason people fail online or offline is advertising and lack of advertising. If you are going to succeed, you must advertise and when you advertise, it needs to be consistent and continuous.
Let’s start with where do you advertise? The short answer is anyplace and everyplace you can. One of the good things about advertising is that it is all around us and you are only limited by yourself. There are plenty of free places to advertise, and by using your ad tracker, you will easily be able to know which ones work and which ones don't.
Now with the above, you will want to start off by focusing on a few ways of advertising such as Traffic Exchanges since they are free or article marketing if you are a good writer or solo ads if you have the money to invest in good solos and you also have some good compelling copy.
Traffic Exchange Example:
Let's take Traffic Exchanges as an example of advertising. There are a variety of ways to advertise below and you can choose any of them you like or come up with your own, but when you start, don't stop and don't get discouraged when and if you don't see immediate results.
Traffic Exchanges are places that allow you to build up credits when you surf or view other websites. They usually have some sort of timer built into them so you need to stay on a page for a set amount of time--usually 10 - 20 seconds.
The number of credits you get varies depending on your account but assume you get one credit for each page you view and let's say you are working with a 10 second time. This means you can see about 4 - 5 different pages in a minute or 240 - 300 an hour if you are totally focused.
Assume you look at 300 and get 300 credits and the ratio of surf to view is 1:1. This means that your site will be seen one time for every one time you look at another site, so based on this, you will be able to have 300 people looking at your site by using your 300 credits.
300 people looking at your site is a good start, but nothing to get too excited about, but if you do this every day for a month, you can have 9,000 people seeing your site for 10 seconds each or about 25 hours of eyeballs in front of your page.
Chances are good that if you have a good page that is well written and entices people to take action with a good incentive, you will get some subscribers into your Autoresponder. This does not mean sales, but you start with subscribers and then move them into buying.
What is Your Time Worth:
Now based on the above, you would have spent about 30 hours to get those 9000 hits to your page and if you only place a $10/hour value on your time, that would be $300 worth of your time to get those 9,000 hits.
All Traffic Exchanges will sell you hits to your page and it won't cost close to $300 for 9,000 hits. For example, at Ezhits, you can buy what is called the Start page where your site is seen as one of the first 3 sites when someone starts surfing and you can buy one of these start pages for a full week for as little at $140.55 and you'll get around 60,000 hits during that week.
It would take you over 200 hours of surfing to get this kind of exposure for your site. Is it worth it? Only you can make that decision, but for me it is well worth it...
I buy one or two of these start pages nearly every week for the I CAN and people are getting signups for this, so based on that alone, if I wanted to build my own list, I would definitely test this with a capture page.
Stay Focused When Using Traffic Exchanges:
One of the bad things about TE's is that you can easily lose your focus because you might see something you like and zip off to check it out and this is something you want to avoid.
You want others to do that with your page, but you don't want to do that for them. You are there to generate credits and get people to see your site and subscribe at your site and that's it.
You Need to Get Your Site Seen:
The bottom line of online advertising is getting your site seen. You cannot run one ad and think you're done. You cannot run an ad every few days or weeks or months and think you're done. You need to have your site seen every day by as many people as you can.
Pick up any newspaper 2 - 3 days in a row and you'll see many of the same businesses advertising on all days. Go to any high traffic site such as ESPN, Weather.com, Yahoo, AOL, etc. and you will see ads from the same companies. Listen to the radio or watch television and you'll hear and see ads from the same businesses.
Most of the ads you read, see and hear are from very large well established businesses, yet they are still constantly and consistently advertising. Now while it is true they all have large advertising budgets, why do they keep advertising if they are so big?
The answer is because they want to get bigger and the ONLY way to do this is to advertise their business and pick up new customers.
You, me and most everyone working from home will not have near the ad budget of these big companies, but that does not mean we cannot advertise.
Finding Dollars to Advertise:
I have said this a thousand times and will continue saying it until people get it into their heads. People spend more money on their cell phone or cable television each month than they do on their business.
This is a sad but true fact and highlights a way that people can easily and without any harm to themselves find money to use for advertising.
Assume you spend $70 a month on your cell phone and most people spend more, but assume you spend $70 a month. How much money do you make from this $70 investment? The answer is zero unless you telemarket with your cell phone.
Now, what if you gave up that cell phone for 6 months and took that $70/month and invested in your business. Yeah, some people are probably starting to get the shakes at the thought of giving up their ability to talk while shopping or walking their dog, but get over it.
That's $420 you can use to invest in your business and you should use it on advertising. If you invested $70/month for 6 months on advertising your business and you don't have some scam business like Zeek was or Ultimate Power Profits is, but if you have a legitimate business, you will recoup all the $420 and a lot more.
Then you simply take some of those profits and invest in more advertising and go back and get your beloved cell phone again if you want.
You can do the same with your cable television and dump that for 6 months. Take that money and invest in your business instead of fattening up the cable company and yourself, you will be building your online business.
Now, most people will never do this because they just don't want to succeed online bad enough.
When I first started my company, I gave up my cell phone and cable television and worked as a server 7 days a week to make extra money so I could invest everything back into my company.
Once I started making money, I got my cell phone back--never did get the cable back and as I made more and more, I quit the server job and have been online full-time ever since.
Building an Online Business is Not Easy:
There are far too many morons telling people they can make thousands overnight or in weeks or months with no work and no money.
There are far too many scams out there that will not be around in 3 - 6 months. Zeek is a good example of this because people were so excited about the easy way to make money, they allowed themselves to look past the business model that was 100% pure Ponzi. Didn't they use to call this Gold Fever?
Look, if you want easy, practice the line, would you like fries with that burger and then go to your local McDonald's and get a job there where you can earn minimum wage, work your 4 - 8 hour shift and go home.
You'll never have freedom, you'll never get rich and you'll always commute to a job and work for someone else and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this as millions of people do it, but if you want better and you want control of your life and you want to do better, than quit believing the hype and focus your attention on advertising your business.
Multiple Stream of Income Myth:
This is another problem people have online as they get involved with too many programs and they cannot mange all of them well. You need to focus on one business and put everything into that one business and once you get it making decent money, then and only then do you get involved with something else.
Of course all the program owners are going to tell you that you need multiple streams of income because if they told the truth, they could not create a new program every year and steal more money from you.
Ads That Don't Work:
Don't waste your time with Advertise.com, Adlandpro, Traffic G, US Free Ads.com, Free Traffic World. Screen Swarm, Free Traffic Bar, or Traffic Swarm as each of these either does not produce or produces too little for the money and time.
In addition, not one of the banners at any traffic exchanges or mailers has even produced a hit. They sell banner impressions, but an impression does not mean a hit and you will blow through impressions really quickly as an impression only means the banner was on a page that someone clicked on.
The banner could be at the very bottom of the page and not even seen but if someone clicked on the page, your banner counts that as an impression.
I have a variety of banners running on the TE's and inside the mailers and they all suck.
Advertising Options:
The ad options below are a starting point for you and by no means the end all and be all for advertising. This is to help you understand some advertising terms and give you a little direction for trying new advertising resources.
Article Writing—Article writing is a great way to generate passive advertising. You write an article related to your business and submit it to the article directories on the net. There are also companies who will do the submission for you but beware of these as they can get pricey and you never know for sure whether or not they will submit as they promise.
Banners—You see banners are just about every website on the Internet and they are all clickable. Banners are fairly inexpensive forms of advertising and unless you place your banner at a paid to click type place, the prospects you get from banner advertising are fairly responsive because they chose to click on your banner based on what it says.
Paid to click type of advertising is generally not going to give you good results because the people are being paid to click on your banner so they click to get a few cents—not because they are interested in what you have to say.
Billboards—You see Billboards as you drive down the highway, but take this a step further and you can put a mini-billboard in the window of your house or car, truck or van. You can also put a mini-billboard along roads although you need to check with zoning to make sure this is legal first.
Remember advertising is only limited by you so when you think of Billboards, think outside the box and not just the standard Billboard.
Business Cards—These are a great way to generate exposure in your business. You don’t need to go to a printer to get these done as you can buy pre-cut business card stock at Office Depot or Staples or any office supply place and print your own.
Drop them in fish bowls that most restaurants have, place them on bulletin boards wherever you see them, give them with a tip at a restaurant or when you order for delivery—just make sure you leave a good tip if you do this, otherwise it will blow up in your face.
Pass these out to friends and people you meet in stores, get them out everyplace you can without breaking any laws. Be careful with this next suggestion, but drop one on the floor of your supermarket every once in a while. You’ll be surprised at what might happen because you never know where that next sale is coming from.
Classified Ads—These are small ads run in online ezines and many times you can get a free classified ad for subscribing to the ezine. You can also place a classified ad in your local newspaper and there are websites similar to priceline.com where you can bid on classified ads in larger newspapers.
Remember Newspapers are hurting for business right now, so they are willing to bargain. Take this into consideration when you are ready to place an ad.
Email Marketing/Blasts—These are done from 3rd party vendors with large lists. Be very careful with these for a number of reasons.
First, you want to make sure the company is legitimate and that you will not be accused of spam when they send your letter. This is always a tricky issue because your name and information are being emailed and if spam complaints come in, they will come against you as well as the list owner. Some programs have very strict spam policies and if you promote their offer and get spam complaints, you’re out of the program and they won’t care that you did not do the mailing. You get a complaint, they will boot you out.
Second, you want to make sure they don’t send multiple offers each day. The more a list is used, the less responsive the list will be. I know people who would send 3 – 4 offers to their lists each day and within 30 days, they lost the majority of their contacts and those who remained were not responding to anything.
Email Signatures—This is one of the easiest ways to advertise because you simply include the link to the program you are involved with in all your emails. Actually, you need to include a tracking link in place of your program link so you can see how many hits you’re getting from this vehicle, but if you send out only 5 emails per day, that is over 1,800 potential prospects each year that can see your site.
You see the little things add up over time and this is also the power of viral advertising and marketing for your site.
Joint Ventures—For a JV to really work well, you need to own the product, service or program as the person you JV with is going to want a cut of any business he/she brings you and you will want the same from them.
Generally a JV works like this: You go to person X and offer them a percentage of sales if they do a mailing for you to their list. The good about this is there is no cost to you. The bad is you are going to lose some profits—although if you have an affiliate program running, you are going to lose profits anyway.
So overall, JV’s are an excellent way to get immediate sales without having to spend any direct money.
Magnetic Signs—How many miles do you drive each day? Depending on where you live and drive, you could have hundreds of people see your car, truck or van each day and magnetic signs turn your vehicle into a moving Billboard.
The cost is small the downside is almost nothing—unless you’re a bad driver and the results can be quite amazing.
Now, there are a couple of things to remember. First make sure you put a magnetic sign on both side of your vehicle. Second, make sure the sign is big enough to be seen from a good distance. Third and probably most importantly is for you to get your own domain that can be easily remembered.
You never want to use an affiliate link on a magnetic sign and you definitely don’t want to use a URL that is hard to read or remember.
Paid to Read Emails—I never recommend paid to read, paid to surf, paid to click or anything like this. The problem is since people are being paid to read the emails, they are just reading and not caring what it says. The theory behind these is good, but in practice it does not work very well unless you are an excellent copywriter.
The owners of these services will tell you that paid to read is great because at least you have people reading all your copy, but the reality of this is they read and don’t care about any part of what they read because they are only doing it for the money they are being paid to do so.
Think about this for yourself. If you were being paid to read emails and you got paid based on the number you read, you would not stop to look at the offers, you would be pumping out those emails as quickly as you can so you can make a few cents.
Also the people who read these emails are not good prospects because if they are willing to spend an hour a day to read emails and get paid 25 cents, they are not the brightest bulbs in the light because smart people don't work for 25 cents an hour.
Pop up Ads—These are ads that look like banners but they are much more annoying and take a lot longer to get results. They are good for branding as they pop-up in front of people when they visit certain sites. They are generally less expensive than regular banner ads and not near as effective.
PPC—Pay Per Click is a good way to get really targeted prospects, but it can also be very expensive. I remember doing a Google PPC campaign a few years ago and I burned through $100 in less than 20 minutes. The problem was I knew very little about PPC and setup my account all wrong with no stop gap measures in place to protect me.
If you decide to use PPC, make sure you put limits on the amount you want to spend and choose your keywords very carefully. If you have doubts about this, you might want to hire someone to do this for you, but you also need to be careful when doing this.
I had a company call me one time and wanted to do PPC for me. I thought this was strange that they would call me when if they were the PPC expert why didn’t they just do PPC for themselves. While they were on the phone I asked them for some of their keywords and when I searched for those words, the company that claimed to be an expert was not showing anyplace in the search engines.
They tried to hide this and tell me they utilize their time and resources to help their clients vs. helping themselves and this is similar to those businesses telling you they will do all the work and you just cash the checks.
Pumping Gas for Cards—Here is a unique approach for you to use and it won’t cost you anything but some time and business cards. Go to a local gas station and ask the owner if he/she will allow you to pump gas for his clients in return for letting you give the person one of your business cards and wearing a shirt with your domain on it.
This is a great way to generate business—especially in the summertime because the persons window will be down and you can talk with them while the gas in pumping.
If the station owner will not allow you to pump gas, then ask if you can clean the windshields of people getting gas? This gives you one on one time with people and if you do this right and keep things very simply and not pushy, you will pick up a client or two for each hour you work the pumps.
Safelists—These are tricky and if used consistently, you will generate some prospects, but the biggest problem with Safelists is you have to agree to receive emails from other members of the Safelists and in return they agree to receive emails from you.
This is purely a numbers game and I know people who make good money using Safelists, but you have to be consistent. I personally pay a company to send to 500,000 people in Safelists twice a day because I don't have time to get emails from 500,000 people and while this does work for me, it does take a few weeks to see results.
SEO—(Search Engine Optimization) This is a very specialized kind of marketing and advertising but can pay off big for you over time. Don’t expect immediate results with SEO and plan on constantly working this type of advertising. You can get listed high in the search engines, but it will take some time and effort on your part.
Just as with PPC, there are companies that tell you they can get you ranked on the first page of the search engines but generally they will use such obscure search terms that while your site might rank on the first page, the search term they are using might be carrots and your site is dealing with animals.
The companies that promise high rankings are either going to charge you thousands of dollars or they are going to use terms that have nothing to do with your business.
There are good SEO companies out there, but finding them is going to take some time and patience and a lot of research.
Social Networks—These are great ways to get your business and yourself known, but just like any advertising there will be work involved and there are many ways to do things wrong, but only a few ways to do things right.
The good news about social sites is they are free and they have hundreds of millions of prospects. The bad news is you can waste a lot of time at these sites if you are not careful.
Solo Ads—I built my first online business with solo ads and these are offered by the online ezines where they send your ad to their entire database and that is the good news. The bad news on Solo ads is that the ezine editors got greedy and started buying leads for their ezines instead of building their lists naturally.
This means that people never really subscribed to get the ezine so the results are poor while the rates increased as solo ad rates are based on the number of subscribers.
Just as with mass emails, you want to find out how often ads are mailed, how are leads generated and how long the ezine has been around. You can ask the owner this question and you can also go to Alexa.com and see how long the domain has been around and how it ranks online.
Traffic—The use of traffic is not to generate sales and signups as much as it is used to generate interest in your particular offer and get you and your business listed higher in the natural search rankings of all the search engines.
So what is your time worth? You must answer this and decide how you want to spend your time online or offline because every minute you spend online searching for free traffic and advertising is another minute you lose with your family or/or friends or doing something else.
The bottom line of traffic is that it serves a specific purpose for you and your online goals. Will you get sales and signups over time? The answer is yes, because traffic is an important part of your overall advertising strategy and when used consistently it will set you apart from many others online.
Traffic Exchanges—This is another usually free advertising service but instead of you getting emails, you get credits to view other clients of the traffic exchange website. You can waste a lot of time with TE’s, but if you are consistent and you have the time to spend on these, you can generate some prospects over time.
As with just about any type of free or low cost type of advertising, you are not going to get a lot of sign ups or sales, but you can generate traffic to your site and you can help yourself because as people see your site more and more, they are more inclined to buy from you.
You can also buy credits at all Traffic Exchanges but be careful where you buy as the prices vary dramatically and the amount of traffic will also vary depending on the exchange itself.
