Yesterday I posted what could be considered a mini-rant from the perspective of online publishing and advertising based revenue models.
Today, I thought I’d take a brief look at the other side of it to show how Internet marketers can find great deals for advertising their products or sites.
To preface this, there are some who claim banner ads are dead, that’s far from true. The problem most people have with banner advertising is A) they fail to be creative in the banners they make (both in design and sizes, stay away from 468×60 banners), and B) they target the wrong places based on traffic rather than market and visitor intent.
I also have to be fair here, the idea for today’s post came to me after reading a posting on the subject of online marketing from my friend Roberta over at BuildThe.com
Roberta and I have worked together on several projects over the years, in fact BuildThe.com is one of those collaborations; but that shouldn’t take anything away from the discussion.
Roberta went into this in far greater detail than I will (so I urge you to read her posting), but I did want to sum up a couple of the “take aways” here because they’re great tips and methods I’ve used myself over the years to find low-cost advertising opportunities where I could reach my target markets.
First, the blogosphere
Whenever I’m starting up a new marketing campaign, one of my first stops for finding advertising opportunities is Google’s blog search.
I just search for posts/blogs that are related to my campaign topic, and when I find one that looks like it probably attracts the demographics that I’m intending to target, I send off a quick email to the blogger and ask about advertising with them.
As Roberta pointed out in her posting, it’s usually better in these instances not to ask about PPC or CPM advertising, because the average blogger isn’t often involved with online advertising enough to feel comfortable with those terms.
It’s much better to simply ask if you can run your banner(s) on their blog, either site wide or maybe just on a single posting if that’s what you think is best for you, for a flat monthly rate.
I’ve found bloggers in the past who had old postings that were related to my topic, sitting at the top of the SERPs, who were willing to let me run a banner on the post for as little as $5 for a whole month.
Think about that, a posting with ranking that you know is getting constant search traffic, with your banner for a whole month for just a couple dollars.
Typically I try to get low-cost site wide deals from bloggers, and I’ve even gotten some of these for like $15 or $20 per month, but if I find a single post that ranks well I’ll sometimes just go after that 1 posting.
Next, article directories
There are tons of article directories out there, and I’m a big fan of publishing articles with them for traffic and backlinks, but there are also some that sell category based banner advertising, and if you don’t have time to write articles this is a great way to get targeted traffic.
To give an example of how beneficial this can be, I used to promote a particular web hosting offer that paid out $120 per signup. Those weren’t free signups, if you’ve ever promoted hosting offers then you know the customer has to signup for a year of hosting and you typically don’t get your commission until after they pass their 4 or 6 week money-back guarantee point with the account.
So, while hosting affiliate programs pay great money, they’re slow to pay off and can be hard to push when you have to sell the full year packages.
Anyway, there was one paying $120 per signup, which is a little more than the average with hosting, so I was pushing them pretty hard.
I found a lot of blogs to buy advertising on, but by far my best deal was a niche article site dedicated to ‘working from home’.
They ran their ads on a rotation basis, so I paid $35 per month to be 1 of the 8 banners in the rotation, and I averaged 3 signups per month from that single ad spot for the duration that I was promoting that offer.
That’s $360 in for every $35 I spent there. I wanted to buy more of the 8 positions, but they were all full so I could only run at the 1 of 8 in the rotations.
The bottom line is, small and niche article directories are great places to put up advertising and it’s easy to find low-cost rates when you look around.
Roberta mentions a few directories in her piece, but if there’s any interest in this I’ll be happy to list some of the ones I’ve worked with in the past. Some of them are very niche specific, but some are also general too, so there would be something in there for everyone. Just comment and let me know if you want more. I could also post some examples of the emails that I use when approaching bloggers about advertising with them.
