Some people argue that there really are no free lunches; somebody has to pay for it. Although this may not always be true, you usually get what you pay for on the Internet.
This is not to say that you will always get what you were promised but the value you get normally matches what you paid. It should then follow that every webmaster should invest some money in promoting their websites. Here are 7 productive ways of investing those ad dollars.
1. Use a reputable Search Engine Optimization company. It is a given that SE provide a doorway to your website wider than any other. A SE strategy should be part of your overall promotion efforts.
There are many companies out there that are promising what they cannot deliver. Just look up their company’s website under the “search engine optimization” and see where they rank. Common sense should tell you that they cannot do any better for you. So choose wisely!
2. Use Pay-Per-Click Search Engines. This is basically the same as number 1, but PPC SE provides a way of getting immediate traffic to your site rather than waiting for your website to be indexed and inch its way up the ranks.
If you are on a small budget then you can use a tool such as http://www.goodkeywords.com to find lesser used and therefore lower-priced words. You can then bid on as many as are relevant to your site. This would be more productive that using the more competitive and higher-priced keywords.
3. Use Solo Ezine Ads. Solo ezine ads remain one of the most low-cost but effective means of advertising on the Internet. A solo ad is sent out by itself to the entire ezine database and therefore gets good exposure compared to a classified ad.
You can simply do a SE search for ezine in your field that offer solo advertising. You can also check out a site such as http://www.litsz.com for a number of widely read ezines. With over 300,000 ezines published online you should have little trouble finding advertisement space.
4. Buying Leads. Buying leads or mailing list is traditionally associated with Network Marketing and the direct mail industry. However, this is not so anymore. Many ezine publishers are now buying subscribers from so called “co-registration” companies that send you subscribers at a price.
This is also known as “pay-per-lead” or “pay-per-subscriber” services and they offer a guaranteed
way to build your optin list for a very reasonable
fee. You can then market to these leads and offer your affiliate program to them. A few such companies are leadfactory.com, hiplists.com and worldlist.com.
5. Offer low-ticket items at auction sites. It’s no secret that auction sites such as ebay.com receive a ton of traffic. If you offer cheap products you can build your customer list very quickly. You can then offer back-end products to increase your return-on-investment.
At least this is one case of “If the mountain cannot come to Mohammed then Mohammed will go to the mountain” Go to where the traffic is and the traffic may follow you!
6. Run off-line ads. Many of the companies that do very well on the Internet are those companies that already had an off-line presence. They had their branding done before they entered the dotcom world.
It is very easy to forget newspaper classifieds and magazine ads when marketing on the Internet. You can use a car decal with your website address and tagline for example to lead visitors to your site.
7. Provide a Press Release. Do you think that you have a website or service that the world should know about? Then maybe they can know about this. You can pay a company such as pressreleasenetwork.com to do a press release for you. You can never tell which online and off-line news network will pick up your story and give you that shot in the arm that you are looking for.
If you need help in the writing of your press releases you may check a service such as ereleases.com.
As a final note I would just like to remind you that we pay for things in cash or time. Most free services require time and therefore are not ‘really’ free. We all have the same amount of hours in the day but we can use our money to leverage our time.
Copyright (c) Ray L. Edwards 2003.
Ray Edwards is the author of “77 Ways To Skyrocket Your Website’s Conversion” and “The No-Click Traffic Sertect” Learn how to drive targeted traffic to your site and convert them into buyers in the quickest time. Visit http://www.raydal.com.
