Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is when you buy short adverts (directly, not through PPC ad networks) on websites and newsletters to promote your site. In this case, you pay by tenure (duration) rather than performance.
It’s one strategy that has not been used very well by most of the internet marketing crowd mainly because it’s not as easy to manage and master as something like PPC advertising.
Since it is not keyword focused as in PPC advertising, there is the fear that you cannot really track your return on investment. It can work out cheaper or more expensive than PPC advertising, depending on the deal, and what you aim to achieve. The quality of traffic you get depends on where you choose to place your adverts.
The benefits of advertising to specific segments of your market is that you are able to reach qualified prospects – people who you know are interested in the information you are offering and people who are proven to make purchases in this niche. This combination (interest + purchasing history) is very powerful and gives you the opportunity to achieve quick and serious results from a small advertising expenditure.
The best way to carry out this strategy is to find out places where the elite in your niche hang out on the Internet. It could be forums, or specific blogs and websites. There could also be newsletters that are immensely popular in your niche (newsletters/ezines offer great conversion rates and ads in them are usually cheap).
You can use paid advertising for reports, for mini-courses or for your regular content websites, but you
have to know how to use this strategy properly. You might be familiar with some or all of these strategies. That’s good, because this will give you a chance to see how to apply them directly to your info product business.
Find these websites and newsletters in your niche and find out what their options are for paid advertising. Ideally you should be gunning for a prominent position and one where you can write your own advertising text (this will usually be short – 50 words or less, 2 or 3 lines. Sometimes it will be like a PPC ad – 2 short lines, and only a dozen or so words allowed. If there is no stated advertising information, simply email them and ask. Most people are quite welcome to the idea of making money off their websites, especially when they don’t have to do any work to get it.
At the end of the day, if you want to do paid or PPC advertising, it comes down to how well you position your ad AND how well you write it. You need to be well versed in marketing before you commit your money to PPC or paid advertising. The safest way to go will be to experiment with free traffic and learn the ropes before you start committing funds or do a test run with a small amount, and work on your conversion ratio tell you get a reasonable figure (say 1% and above before you go splashing money on traffic)..
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