When picking where to advertise on the Internet, you have to keep in mind various factors.
One is your audience. If you’re looking to sell fishing poles, advertising on a Work At Home Mom website isn’t targeted advertising. You’ll sell some, but your sales won’t be as high as if you’re selling on a fishing website. You must identify your audience before picking an advertising location. Too many new marketers focus on what they’re selling, and not who they’re selling it to.
Another is where the advertisement will appear. Site wide advertisements will get your ad in front of a lot of eyes, but aren’t necessarily the best place. Even with a targeted audience, not everyone in that audience is ready to buy your product. Ideally, you want a page that reflects some problem that your product can solve, some need it can fill, or at least a proven willingness to purchase.
Pages that address the particular problem or need that your product solves or fills are a great place to advertise. If you’ve chosen a product that has a broad appeal to your target audience, then there will be pages like this on nearly every website devoted to that audience. If you’re having trouble finding those pages, then maybe you’ve picked the wrong target audience, or the wrong product for that audience.
A nice middle ground is to advertise on the Thank You page for other products in your niche. That will get your product seen by people who have just finished buying another product in the niche. You can often make these sorts of advertising arrangements directly with the website owners.
A less targeted alternative to working directly with website owners is ThankYouAds.com. It’s basically a traffic exchange for ads placed directly onto Thank You pages. You have a limited ability to select the niche by choosing one out of twenty-two categories for your ad. So it won’t be as targeted as picking a specific Thank You page to advertise on, but is better than just a random exchange. My preliminary testing with this service doesn’t show a good enough conversion rate to justify using it, though, so it could be that some members are not displaying the ads on their Thank You pages after all.
Like most things online, you can invest your time locating appropriate pages on target websites and making arrangements with the website owners, or you can use an automated system that converts your traffic into views of your ads. Investing your time will always yield better results, but the automated systems give you the benefit of hands-off operation.
Ultimately, you have to decide how much of your time you’re willing to invest in your online business.
I agree, where you advertise is very important. I’ve also realized that what you use as your tagline or keywords is just as important.
Sorry I haven’t been around much. I’ve been so busy. I always read your blog through my ‘feeder’ though;)
[quote post=”425″]Sorry I haven’t been around much. I’ve been so busy. I always read your blog through my ‘feeder’ though;)[/quote]
No problem, Lori. I hope you got your computer problems all sorted out!
In my opinion the best way to advertise is in building links to your site and writing articles is one of the best ways.You get free advertising for life basically.
Hi Tom, I’d classify getting links to your site as an SEO technique, and article writing as marketing (increasing exposure of your brand). When I use the word “advertise”, I’m talking about trying to sell a product or service.