General advertising and promotion - Multiple streams of Traffic

by: Eric Koshinsky

You are free to publish this article online in your ezine website, ebook, or other online publication. The full resource box, including 'By line' must remain intact and be published with the article. If you publish this article, please contact me and let me know where you are using it. Contact at: artpub@newbie-guides.com --- **Article info** Word count: 1085 approximately Hard-wrapped at 65 characters --- General advertising and promotion - Multiple streams of Traffic: PART II There are a variety of ways that you can advertise and promote your site or products. In this, Part II of the 'mini-series' on Multiple streams of traffic, I'd like to take a look at a couple of the more commonly known methods of online promotion. Some are much better than others, and some are more suitable than others. Our goal then is to look a little more closely at them to determine if they are suitable for your needs. Read on for more... Banner ads Using banner advertising and displaying banner ads on your site has changed a lot in the last 2 years. The cost and value (benefit) of banner advertising has dropped significantly. I won't talk about them too much other than to say that their main use is now principally as 'branding' tools. A way to get your name/product/site in the front of people's faces quickly. For the average person, it is nearly impossible to get the kind of reach required to really get much benefit from banners. That being said, if you can get good exposure in a niche that fits your market, go for it, it won't hurt. On the other side of things, displaying banners on your site as a source of revenue is only worthwhile if you are getting thousands upon thousands of hits/month. The average CPM is now only about $2.00 (that means you earn $2.00 for every 1000 banners displayed!). Considering that when you display a banner on your site you are promoting a product or site that is not your own, you are giving visitors an exit that does not generate income for you. It isn't any wonder that the top online marketers (Cory Rudl, Jimmy D. Brown, Ken Evoy etc.) don't display ANY ads (banners or anything) from any other site. I am not knocking banners here. They serve a purpose. You just need to be sure that they suit your purposes. I have found that the FastClick Ad Network provides very good service for all your banner advertising needs. FFA's and traffic swaps Let me be very blunt about FFA's. They are a waste of time for anyone except the person who owns it. No matter what the claims may be, they will not produce traffic. Traffic swaps and exit exchanges have to potential to produce reasonably large amounts of traffic, however the problem is that for the most part it is untargeted. Most traffic swaps are based on a system of credits, where your site gets a visitor in exchange for displaying the traffic swap link on your site, or visiting a member site yourself. The real problem is that much of the traffic is simply other webmasters trying to boost their own credits. They are not interested in visiting your site except to get the credit. I'm sure you can see the problems with that. In a way, you can think of traffic swaps as an online equivalent of a highway detour. Lots of traffic gets re-directed your way, but it doesn't really want to be there. If you are interested in learning more about traffic swaps, you can go here to take a look at a popular one. More recently, a slightly different breed of traffic swap has emerged. These focus on generating ezine subscribers. The way they work is basically the same as the a normal traffic swap, however because they are directed specifically at getting subscribers, they don't create junk traffic. Every time you display the pop-up containing the ezine registration form, you earn an impression for your subscription link on another site. When visitors see the pop-up with the links, they choose to sign up for your ezine. There are still very few of them around, so they are very effective and produce good results. There are a few services that provide opt-in services for a fee (usually in the range of $1.00/subscriber), but I prefer free ;-). I have had very good results with this service. It is 100% free and generates dozens of subscribers a week. Ezine advertising Ezine ads (both solo and classified ads) can be very effective if done right. They can also be utterly useless. The key is to get your ads in ezines that are very closely related to your product(s), and that don't run tons of ads. There are literally thousands of ezines out there that are essentially advertising rags. Their only purpose is to run ads for you and every other person willing to spend $15. Before you advertise in any ezine, get some information about the ezine. A decent publisher will know their subscriber base and be able to tell you with reasonable accuracy how responsive the subscribers are, how many ads they run, and if someone has recently run an ad like yours (similar products). If they can't do that, you might want to think twice about advertising with them. Realistically what you want is an ezine with a reasonably large subscriber base (1000 or more), that is closely related to your product, and only accepts limited advertising (e.g. 1 ad/issue). Stephan Peirce's book goes into great detail on how to find good ezines and what to look for and what to avoid - it costs less than a solo ad in a decent ezine, and will save you tons of money in avoided mistakes. A final comment: Anyone who claims they can provide you with 100,000 (500,000, whatever) guaranteed visitors is selling junk. Think of it this way, if it were so easy to get that many targeted visitors (and you only want targeted visitors), you can bet companies (scammers) wouldn't be selling them because they would be raking in millions in profits by directing those visitors to their own products and sites! Do a little math, 1% conversion (a very low rate) from 100,000 visitors = 1,000 buying visitors. Sell a $10 product and you have $10,000. If such a profit is possible, why the hell is this kind of traffic sold for $50-$200? Quite simply because it is junk traffic, frequently created by piggy backing on traffic exchanges and FFA's. In the next section of the series we will start to look at some of the less well known methods of traffic generation, and how you can put them to use to generate a more stable and consistent base of traffic for your own sites. --------------------------- Eric Koshinsky: webmaster and guide at Newbie-guides.com We aim to provide useful tips and guidance for those who are new to personal online marketing. Learn more about programs, techniques, and software that can help you reach your online marketing goals. Come on by and have a look. http://www.newbie-guides.com/?aa Join our newsletter: news@newbie-guides.com About the Author Eric Koshinsky: webmaster and guide at Newbie-guides.com We aim to provide useful tips and guidance for those who are new to personal online marketing. Learn more about programs, techniques, and software that can help you reach your online marketing goals. Come on by and have a look. http://www.newbie-guides.com/?aa Join our newsletter: news@newbie-guides.com