Free Advertising & Internet Marketing Jaanvi 03k Kamboj
December 04, 2008
One overlooked or misused form of advertising is free advertising.
However, this can be a very important means of growing your business.
There are innumerable free classified advertising sites on the internet One
immediately visible advantage of free advertising is the adjective,
"free". Many people starting internet businesses simply do not have the
funds to buy advertising.
By the same token, a disadvantage to
free advertising is that since it is free, everybody floods it with all
kinds of ads, and it is easy for your message to get lost in the flood
of advertisements.
Another disadvantage is that unlike people
who look through newspaper classifieds or advertising papers such as
are found at the local convenience store, few people on the Internet
actually visit online classified sites in hopes of finding a car or
piece of stereo equipment. Even if they do, they are not likely to see
your ad if you are trying to interest someone in an internet income
opportunity.
So, how can you turn free advertising to your advantage?
First,
as mentioned, some sites will have the potential for improving your
business in one way or another, and some will be totally worthless.
Since the advertisement itself may or may not be effective, or may or
may not be effective at a certain website, testing is necessary.
Different ads must be tried, and they must be tried on different sites.
A
difficulty in determining the value of a given free advertising site is
the fact that with the advent of automatic advertising submitters, many
sites are hardly ever visited by humans any more. Only the automatic
programs drop by and leave off their ads and move on to the next site.
Therefore, one of the first criteria to look for might be whether or
not ads must be manually posted. At least in that case, humans will
visit and may actually see your ad.
By the way, even a site
which can be posted to automatically may be of value in the area of
linking and search engine optimization. Most of these links will be
fleeting or of little value to a search engine spider, but you may be
able to build a little stable of sites which will help search engines
find your site. I know of several sites where I regularly post ads
exactly for this purpose. (which requires manual submission) for
example is regularly visited by search engine spiders, and if I place
an ad there, the page I have linked to will soon show up in search
engine listings.
Second, free advertising is most effective if
it is not used to sell anything. In fact, it will operate best when you
use the free advertising to give something of value away in order to
establish a condition of trust between yourself and a prospective
customer. In the heyday of mail order advertising, this was often
referred to as the "two step" method.
It worked, and still
works, like this. The seller offers a free report, such as "How to Make
Money from Your Kitchen Table". The ad simply makes the offer, and
often would request the reader to send a "free, self-addressed, stamped
envelope" for the free report. In this way, the seller was able to get
his materials in the hands of several interested parties for only the
cost of the report and the ad. The seller was saved the postage by the
reader who provided the envelope and postage. Enclosed with the report
were materials offering other items, often more reports, which were
sold by the seller.
If the seller had provided a report of value
on the first mailing, it was possible that the reader would purchase
one of the items. If not, the name and address was still on the
seller's records (mailing list) and the reader would receive more
mailings and/or a collection of such names and addresses would be sold
to others who had not built their own lists as yet.
The same
thing is done on the internet, and many successful advertisements offer
free advertising, software, reports, or services in order to entice the
online reader to respond, thus placing his or her contact information
at the disposal of the advertiser.
This sort of advertising on
the internet has spawned two distinct "advertising" methods which,
while free, are not actually advertisements. These two methods are the
writing of articles and the creation of lead capture pages.
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