PBAC Blog

By now you should know that advertising and marketing are two different things.

In this article, when I talk about advertising, I’m only talking about the copy you use to generate traffic to your web site, whether it be banner ads, text ads, or any other kind of advertising.

Pay-per-click advertising offers even someone new to Internet marketing a chance to test the waters and learn what works, and it can be done inexpensively at first, with a completely controlled budget. That’s nice for most people to hear, that you can put a cap on what you spend on advertising, and see the results as you go so you know what’s working for you and what’s not.

Here are the basics…

If you are advertising to a laser-targeted group of people, such as with search-based PPC advertising (like Google AdWords), you want your ad copy to be very specific and to closely match the content of the page you are sending people to when they click.

The reason for that is, you don’t want to pay for unqualified clicks, meaning - people who are unlikely to buy, signup or whatever you’re trying to achieve with the traffic. The more information you can give in your ad about what you’re offering, the more you can narrow down WHO clicks on your ads. That way you’re not paying for people to click your ad unless they are very good prospects for what you’re offering.

I’ve even gone so far as to include the price of my product in the actual ad.

With content networks (yes, Google has one of these too), you shouldn’t pay quite as much per click, bid about half of what you would pay for a search generated click. People on content pages might click your ad because it interests them, but they didn’t originate as being someone who was already searching for one of your keywords, so their value as a prospect is somewhat lower.

When you are advertising to a broader audience and paying by the impression (CPM = cost per 1000 views of your ad), your ad needs to appeal to a broader audience. It should not include specifics and it helps if it’s even a little edgy or controversial. Why? Because with CPM advertising, you’re not paying for the clicks, you’re paying for the views. You WANT as many people as possible to click on it, and since almost all CPM advertising is placed on content sites and is not search-based, having an edgy or eye-catching ad headline can help draw attention away from the copy of the page.

To be successful at CPM advertising, you have to be able to capture someone’s attention to the point that they click your ad instead of continuing on with whatever they were doing. You have to snap them out of a zone to get them to click. Since you’re not paying for clicks regardless, you’re paying for views, try to get as many clicks as possible. I’ve ran some CRAZY ads on a per impression basis that have done pretty well.

So let’s rinse and repeat.

CPC = detailed/exact/targeted CPM = broader/edgy/controversial (designed to get mass clicks)

I’m not at all saying you should take your edgy CPM ad and put it on ANY site just because it gets good clickthroughs. You should still be running it on sites that are likely to be hangouts of your target prospects, I’m just pointing out that it needs to differ from how you advertise on a per click basis.

FREE Advertising, does it work?

The answer to this is YES!

Of course it works, it’s all a matter of HOW you are advertising, and what method of marketing you are using once you get the click. The best sources of free advertising I’ve found are article submission sites, where you write an article of interest, then put your sig file and a link to your site in the author resource box at the bottom, and then your article gets picked up, used and passed around by others.

And #2, forums and message boards. With this kind of advertising, you really should NOT blatantly advertise. If you’re on a forum where people are in your target market, you’re likely to find posts that you can add to, such as helping someone who has a question, or putting in your two-cents on a post that’s just a discussion.

Again, you can have a sig file with a link to your site, but your posts should never just be an ad. Write good content, be of genuine help to people, and the people who land on that forum page will take notice and often visit your site.

Here are some other great sources of free traffic.

- Your own blog - Community sites, MySpace, Squidoo, Facebook - YouTube (put your URL in your videos)

If you write articles based on what you are selling or the market you are in, and submit them to article directories, copy those same articles and edit them a little, then use them as blog posts at the online communities you belong to, or if you want to take it a step further, recite or discuss the article on video and upload it to YouTube.

I’ve gotten some wild traffic from YouTube before, with just one of my videos generating a lot of free leads daily, just by including a link in the video that goes to my lead capture (squeeze) page.

If you have good marketing in place (squeeze page, autoresponder, follow-up), the major portion of your day could actually be spent with free places to advertise and you could do very well with that alone.

A guy I met in Austin recently revealed that 90% of his traffic, for his multi-million dollar per year information product business, came from articles he either wrote or had written for him, and submitted to article directories - an average of 2 or more articles submitted per day.

If he can do that and generate enough FREE traffic to build a $3 Million per year business, don’t you think you should give more consideration to the Web 2.0 strategies that are free AND work well, and will provide you with traffic for a long time to come?

The key to making this work for you is to come up with a game plan, what you’re going to do every day - and then STICK WITH IT. And ALWAYS direct traffic into your main marketing funnel.

It takes time for this kind of advertising to work, but as more and more of your articles and blog posts get spread around the Internet by others, your site will turn into a HUB of traffic. That’s what you want to happen!

Bram Smith is a home business mentor who has helped MANY reach a six-figure per year income level, and a leader of one of the fastest growing and highest earning teams in home biz.

Learn more at –>> http://www.MentorMeetings.com

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