All about advertising

About Advertising

The number one reason people fail online or offline is advertising and lack of advertising. If you are going to succeed, you must advertise. With 12SC you get one of the best ad trackers on the Internet, but it will only help you if you advertise, so how and where do you advertise? These are the $10 million questions, but we will give you as much help as we can and also make sure you attend the training conference on Thursday nights as Eric Burgoyne, the owner of KnowforProfit.com will give you more information on advertising.

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, but most of them are junk as all you are doing is advertising to a bunch of freebie chasers who are only involved at the free advertising place to advertise their scams.

Below are some advertising options for you to consider:

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 3^rd 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, 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.

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.

 

 Paid to click -- I used to hate these as well, but I have tried them again and have had good results. If you are going to try these stick with the larger ones as they seem to produce better results.

 

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 problem with Safelists are they are full of the freebie chasers who won�t ever buy anything online. You agree to receive emails from other members of the Safelists and in return they agree to receive emails from you.

Everyone uses a junk email account because depending on the size of the Safelists, you can get thousands of emails each day and the others are getting that many too. Nobody has time to go through all those emails, so yours ends up in the delete file just like the others.

 

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.

Wanda Rawlins conducts a training class on using the Social sites on Friday nights in the 12SC conference room, so take some time and attend her class to find out how to best use these services.

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 subscrembed 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 was 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. You might ask why would I want to spend advertising dollars on something that will not bring me sales or sign ups? The answer is because you want your site to be found during searches without having to pay the search engines for ad placements which are extremely expensive.

Let�s say there are 1,000 people promoting the same business and only one of them is using traffic. When someone does a search for anything having to do with that business, the person using the traffic is going to rank at the top of the search engines and everyone else will either not rank or be so far down the list, that they are never be seen.

Even if 100 people are using traffic, but only one is consistent, that one person will be far ahead in the natural search rankings.

What does it mean to be consistent?

 

This means you are always sending traffic to your site and not buying 5,000 visitors one month and then waiting 4 months to get another 5,000 as that does more harm than good. The search engines want to see consistent growth and not a bunch of hits followed by nothing.

If you are working a traffic exchange do it on a REGULAR BASIS not once and forget it. Not every 3 weeks when you remember. Surf 2 or 3 times per week!!!! Keep at it do not give up.

Are there other ways to get traffic? Yes, anything you do that gets people to your site is traffic. Whether you use traffic exchanges, solo ads, email blasts, business cards, magnetic signs on your vehicle or any other type of advertising will get traffic to your site. The question you need to ask is can you get 5,000 hits to your page for less than you�ll pay for traffic from 12SC?  Factor in your time because traffic exchanges will take time as will safelists postings or Facebook, MySpace, etc.

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 are paid in money or 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.

The Smart Page in 12SC has a Traffic Exchange script built into it so you can easily manage all your TE�s from one place.

 

So there are some places to advertise and now let�s talk about how to advertise.   Any program you are involved with is going to give you banners, messages, capture pages etc. and while these are all helpful, you need to always remember that if you are going to succeed online, you need to grow your mailing list.

The best way for you to advertise is to create or have a really good capture page created for you.  Once they sign up, you then let the Autoresponder messages to the work for you and lead them in the direction you want them to take.

By having your own generic type capture page, you can then promote anything you want to your prospects as they joined your list to get information from you and not on one particular program.

You also simplify your life because you only have to promote one website and that is your capture page so people can subscribe to get information and once they do, they are your prospect until they buy from you or remove themselves from your mailing list.

This is the essence of powerful and easy advertising. You are advertising for yourself and not for someone else and you are building your prospect list for yourself and not for someone else.

As you build your prospect list, you will start seeing your online income increase and just make sure that you always take a percentage of your sales and invest back into your advertising.

Never stop advertising and never stop growing your list and you can make it online. If you are not building your prospect list, you might still make it, but it will take years longer and you are going to spend a lot more money and time to get where you want to get.

 

    I also use a traffic exchanges as well: 
  
     Traffic 4 Webmasters  
      Great exchange lots of extras

     Legacy Hits  

     Great place good traffic and some good signups as well

      Website Traffic Hog

     Great for traffic and a few sign ups so far.

     Gopher Hits  

     Great for traffic, leads, and making a few dollars

 

     Thumbvu Traffic Exchange 

     One of my new ones, so far very good traffic and some leads.

 

      Surf Skeleton

       A fun surf with good traffic and some leads.

      

     

 If you are serious about using traffic exchanges you need to look at this free to join and use program  ClickTrackProfit 

 

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                Some other programs That I make money with 

                                     clixsense

Been using this site for years, with great results.

Nerdbux new PTC program that's has over 50,000 members already. I have been making good money on here. As well its a great place to advertise your programs.

Pro Bux PTC 

 Great PTC not only for ads, but making a little cash as well.

 

 

 

I found this cool new program called Click Track
Profit

Join now for free and check out this amazing new
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agree, that ClickTrackProfit is a winner!

This program has been great for building down lines in other programs. I have now upgraded and have been getting even more leads.

All the best

Eric Burgoyne

http://www.knowforprofit.com

http://www.ericburgoyne.com