How To Be Successful With Free Advertising
How Do I Know All This?
After studying so-called helpful books from the late night infomercials, I gathered the few (and I mean few) helpful tidbits. Then I had to research it myself, put it in practice, then tracked results to see what works and what does not work. After a few years of trial and error on the Internet, this is what I have learned. And I give it to you for FREE!
If I can help at least one person to avoid the pitfalls and save them countless hours of frustration, I will feel that all my time, effort and investment was well worth it.
The key to keeping your business thriving on the Internet is to advertise. Most of the time people will go about it in a haphazard way and complain that advertising just doesn't work. Some of the newbies and desperate people will resort to spam. There is a right way and a wrong way to advertise.
The Wrong Way
SPAM - Just don't do it! There are some sneaky people who will make convincing arguments why you should send your message via bulk email with the lists they pull from newsgroups, chat rooms and so forth. If anyone is selling you a list of email names of opportunity seekers or a program to pull active emails that are online, don't go for it. You will get a lot of attention, but not for your offer. You will get hate mail, threats, remove requests, and either a warning or just kicked off your ISP. No one will be likely to buy your product. Unless the person has requested from you to receive such email or you do it with a closed group of people who are requesting this information, do not send a commercial email to a stranger. However, there is a way around it. See below!
Haphazard Method - This is usually the case with those who do not actually have anything to do with the production of the web site they are promoting. This is common in MLM plans, paid to plans, and other biz opps where the company provides you with a web site to promote. Unfortunately, even those who do the nitty gritty of designing a site or pay big money to get it developed also use the haphazard method. It just won't work. This method is to just put a minimal effort to advertise in one or two classifieds, a few newsletters, mass free for all pages once or twice a month then to expect a hoarde of customers waiting to buy. Advertising is a numbers game and it needs to be done consistently before people take notice. This means you must do it on a regular schedule a few times a week.
Weak Attention Getters and Weak Ads - You must have a headline that screams, "Pay attention to me!" You must also work on a sub-headline to draw the reader to your offer. If you don't get attention, you will go unnoticed.
The Right Way
It's A War, Not A Battle - You cannot believe that placing the right ad once in the right place will make you set for life. It may get you a few offers, but it won't continue for too long. Be sure to taper your online ads with local advertising and obtaining FREE press coverage (make something unique about your site or offer and write a press release to as many papers as possible or use a service to do it for you, you will get a spot in the paper advertising your deal.) Advertising requires a plan including the following ten step actions: [Be sure to bookmark this page since this method will take a few days to accomplish the results you want.]
Timing and Targeting are subtle factors in determining the response of an ad. You want to make sure the ad you are circulating is appearing to your likely customers. If you have a get rich quick plan, it may not go over extremely well in a forum of religious people who have taken a vow of poverty. If you are selling fishing supplies, it is not good to show it to an audience of a women's knitting circle. Place your ads carefully where your likely customer will see it.
Then you must consider the timing of when your ad will be placed. Holidays seasons seem to be starting as early as August, but the frenzy starts in early November and peaks after Thanksgiving, so if you are selling gift items, this would be your best time to place your ad. Business opportunities are big boom all year around, but peak after the Christmas season when people realize they need to pay for all the holiday expenses. Diet and exercise plans are also big all year, but September is a good peak for those who want to lose weight before the holidays. January and Feburary are great for those who put on pounds during the holidays and are for those soon to be spring and summer brides. Recipes you sell that are related to the time of the season do well, for instance, if you are selling Watermelon punch recipes, don't do it in December.
All items can be sold if marketed correctly no matter which time of the year it is, but some products sell better at certain times than others.
For online campaigns, you need to create a web page that is your main ad which will point out all the reasons why your customer should buy and how to buy. You will also need to create classified ads and ffa link ads to direct people to see your sales page. These are merely teasers to qualify potential customers to read the full sales pitch.
Words and Design Make A Difference. Some of the things that can make a difference in an ad that encourages people to buy or even consider your offer and those that tune out and go away are in the presentation itself. By E-mail, ffa sites and classified ads, you need something to catch the reader's eye immediately. Try this list of powerful words when creating an eye catching headline.
If you are instructing the person to your web site or to open the e-mail, then you must work on the presentation of the sales pitch. Keep it short, simple and to the point. Point out what is in it for the reader when they buy your goods. Give them more value, freebies, or some incentive to buy. Make it easy to buy. On a web site, make the colors on your site easy on the eyes. Try to center your pitch and create some empty space so your message doesn't seem crowded. Use headlines and subheadlines to break up the points and use bullets to break the point down further.
Creating Your Main Ad
Find a place to put your ad. One option online is a classified ad format such as Adland Classified Ads. Offline tabloids and newspapers are good depending on what you are selling. Flyers, business cards and even commercials are something to consider. Print ads often are the most effective. Keep these tips in mind for print ads:
- Know your target.
- Keep your ad short and simple.
- Your ad must have the following to work: Attention Interest Desire Action
- Use power words.
- Create a headline, sub-headline, and bullet points next to product benefits and what is in it for the customer.
- Ask for the order.
- Direct exactly how to place the order
- Thank them
Your main ad will also suffice as ad copy when posting to safe email lists and in your ffa response ad, only you will route the customer directly to the order page.
Creating Your Classified Ad
Based upon your main ad, create a long headline using power words. For instance, if you are selling an opportunity to make money by giving things away, you could use this: "Make Big Money Giving Things Away For FREE! Easy to do. Guaranteed results. Come visit my site for complete details! It is short. It qualifies your customers in weeding out those who want to make money. It uses some powerful words. The first sentence could be used as the headline in your main ad.
Creating Your FFA Ad
Break down your classified ad down to one sentence.
In addition to this ad for you to post to ffa sites, you need an ad to come from YOUR ffa site. Create a catchy headline for the subject and make your pitch in the body of what will go into the e-mail of those who post to your ffa site.
Now that you have a place ready for folks to come and your sales pitch laid out, the real work is about to begin!
Step One:
Get A Web Site To Start The Ball Rolling! If you want to be in business you need to set up shop. Doing business online means having a prime piece of Internet real estate which is a proper web site. It looks more credible when you are a dot something. If you want to get your own site together, go to Webmasters Tools to find out how to set yourself up.
Your site will need to be optimize for search engines. This involves a combination of using meta tags, key words, and common linkage to get higher up in search engines. More information on this can be found in Webmasters Tools.
Have something to offer those who come to visit your site that will keep them coming back. CONTENT IS IMPORTANT!! Many times people will not buy from someone who they feel may not be around very long. If they keep coming back to your site they start to trust you and are more likely to buy something. If you just want a site that showcases your hobby or family or something personal and you don't want advertising cluttering your theme, get an autoresponder where visitors can get a sales pitch by email.
Offer freebies on your site and you will develop a loyal following!
Be sure to make use of cgi scripts to make your site interactive. One of the best cgi scripts you can use is the Refer A Friend script where someone visiting can click on the link to invite their friends to come and see your site. This is a great way to promote word of mouth traffic. You can find an easy to use Refer A Friend Script by clicking here. Download the script and follow the instructions carefully. Set the permissions correctly. Upload as ascii. Be sure the path is correct as well as your email settings.
Step Two:
Register To Search Engines is something you can do with a submission service, but it does not guarantee it will be registered. There are only a handful of search engines that are necessary to post your site. Yahoo, while not actually a search engine, needs to be done manually. Yahoo is not difficult to register and there is no big secret, just find the category where your site belongs then click on the link at the bottom to suggest a site and fill out the form. Be sure to list your site in the correct category! If your site is about fishing, don't put it in the adult xxx categories, any hits you get from that will not be reliable. If you target your site to the right category, those who are specifically looking for something in that category is more likely to take you seriously.
The Best Resource To Submit By Second Party
By signing up with Scrub The Web, you can submit as many web sites as you own into the system. Just enter the information and it guides you through each of the major engines one by one so you can verify that it has actually been submitted.
The Best Resource To Submit By Software
If you choose to submit yourself, you can use software to post your ads for you. Most of the submission software out there is garbage! Be cautious of those that claim to post to Yahoo and others like it as you must choose a category, subcategory and then fill out the information for them to consider it. Unless the software has the correct information within it to post that to Yahoo, it will not post. Be careful of the ones you choose. Some have bad customer service, lack of updating, or a bad product which may crash your computer. There is only 1 I would recommend (and I also use to promote my sites as well.) It costs $99, but well worth it.
With iSeekTraffic, you can simply enter the URL of your web site and have it spider your site to pull the title, description and keywords from all the pages of your web site. That feature alone saves a lot of time from having to manually enter each page.
You can then check off which sites you wish to submit and choose your posting options of batch ffa sites, single ffa sites, and search engines. Once you click Submit, then you are free to do something else while your ads are going out all over the Internet. This method takes you only 5 minutes a day or less.
Manual submission will take time, but it is the ONLY way to guarantee that the work was done in submitting your site, especially in search engines.
Step Three:
FFA Sites are a great way to help your boosting on search engines and contrary to what was thought to be true, people do click on links in FFA sites. I tried an experiment to see if people actually did visit sites from the FFA pages. I had 30 specific links that were only advertised on FFA sites and each time I ran them in the those pages, I would immediately get anywhere between 3-50 hits depending on how I worded the ad. Be sure to do this through the Search Engine Blaster to make this an automatic process daily.
Step Four:
The other way to use the FFA system to your advantage is to have your own. If you have your own web site that has the cgi-bin which will allow you to run this script, you can create an ffa page for people to post to your site. When they post, they receive a confirmation e-mail thanking them for posting on your site along with your sales pitch. If you use a catchy enough ad for the subject line, sometime people will open it before deleting it. This will give you more publicity if done the right way.
To get your own FFA script, go to Matt's Script Archives and carefully follow the instructions to install the script. Be sure to change the settings to the correct path and upload the files as ascii and not binary and put in the proper settings for the script to work.
Alternatively, if you don't have access to a cgi-bin or are on a free web site, use a service such as FFANET. If you sign up for a PRO site, you can customize your autoresponse message without having to compete with anyone else's message. Unfortunately, if you have one of those sites, most submission services will not take your site as they are already either listed or do not take from bulk services.
In the long run, it is better to have one hosted on your own site. You have more control over what goes in and out.
Step Five:
Safely E-Mail Your Ad - Once you have a web site running, you can add a bit of code to your site to invite people to sign up to your FREE newsletter. Just be sure when you take such subscriptions you do it via auto-responder set ups that can take the incoming request, send them out a letter to verify that they did indeed subscribe and automatically keep a record of the name and e-mail as proof as well as keep it in your database so you can send them the newsletter in bulk with the rest of the group.
What's a newsletter? They are an excellent way to advertise, BUT be sure of the newsletter format you choose. The flaw with some is they tend to be filled with too many ads which turns off the audience immediately. Oftentimes, the subscriptions are going to a junk (free) e-mail account where all incoming mail is automatically trashed before reading.
A good newsletter is a chance for you to keep in touch with visitors to your site. It can be daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. Weekly and monthly newsletters are better than daily or quarterly because with the first option people tend to feel bombarded and with the latter people have too much time passing and they forget they signed up.
Don't just turn it into a spam newsletter or your subscribers will quickly opt out! Balance it with appropriate content related to your web site and blend in invitations to come back, new updates and articles on your site, and even offer other freebies in your newsletter such as "If you stop by my site and e-mail with the correct number of smiley faces on a certain page, you will win a free prize."
A good newsletter is fun for the reader who looks forward in opening it up. A fair newsletter is one the reader may or may not open depending on how much time they have. A bad newsletter is immediately deleted, or put into the spam filter, or has you accused of spam, or is opted out shortly after signing up. Remember, you want to aim for a newsletter people actually can't wait to open! This guarantees you actually have an audience. Don't risk the reputation of your newsletter by making it a spam-zine.
Yes, you can place ads in a newsletter, but at least balance it out with content. A good ratio would be 1 ad for every 2 articles. A good layout is as follow:
- Welcome
- Byline/Purpose of the newsletter
- REQUIRED Opt-Out information, ask to see below for details as well as a reminder they are on the list because they have subscribed to it through your web site [also list your web site URL in this section]
- Feature Ad [This can be one of yours or paid for by a reader or an outside advertiser]
- Article 1
- Link to appropriate web site [It helps if you request article submissions from readers who only want a link to their web site. You get free content, your readers get interesting material, and the writer gets free traffic. Everyone wins]
- Article 2
- This should be one you create. Be sure to put a link to your own web site.
- Another Ad [Like before, this can either be one of your own or one paid for by someone else.]
- Teaser [Always put in what will be expected in the next issue to give them something to look for in their e-mail.]
- A Word About Your Site [Just remind your readers about your web site, new things on it, and invite them to come back soon.]
- Complete Opt-Out instructions
Step Six
Classified Ads work better than free for all sites, but you need to be careful of where you place the ad. In sites where you pay to post an ad you have a decent chance of being seen by traffic. In free sites, you need to post every 3 days to keep your ad on top of the pile and is not really worth the effort to visit this often unless you use Search Engine Blaster to do this for you. One site is worth your visit, Adland Classified Ads. This is a great place to place your ad and have it linked to over 5000 other sites. Be sure to place your FREE ad then buy a series of 5,000 or more exclusive spots where your ad will be highlighted in a very visable spot on the front page. This way your ad is never buried.
Step Seven
Newsletters/Ezines From Others are good if you cannot be bothered to write a regular newsletter or do not want to deal with the risk of spam accusations, you can use other well established e-zines and newsletters, BUT be sure of the ezine you choose. The flaw with some ezines (and advertising on ad friendly newsgroups) is that those who are subscribed to them do so ONLY to advertise their own products, NOT to read YOURS. Oftentimes, the subscriptions are going to a junk (free) e-mail account where all incoming mail is automatically trashed before reading.
Before you consider this form of advertising, look at the demographics of the subscribers and ask if there is an ulterior motive for those subscribed to be on the list. If the audience is being paid or given points to read or click on your link, that is not quality traffic. If the audience is made up of strictly other advertisers, chances are slim they are interested in your product/service/opportunity.
A good rule of thumb in finding newsletters and e-zines in which to advertise is to read it yourself. If it looks like something you would welcome in your e-mail and you enjoy the content, chances are others will, too. That is the one you want to use.
If you want to take your chance on this form of advertising, these resources are among the best where you will have a half-way decent chance of having your ad read. $2 Ezine Ads and Directory Of Ezines.
It may cost you more, but seek out topic related theme ezines that have actual articles and/or reader feedback. If the audience is made to feel more of a part of each issue, they are more likely to see your ad. Adland Digest is an example of such an ezine. You can subscribe free when you place an ad.
If you have your own web site you can start your own newsletter or ezine based upon the topic of your site which will be mostly for those who are already familiar with your site who are likely to consider commercial offers from you. It can be once a week, once a month, daily or however often you wish to run it. Feature what's new on your site, your offers and give the readers a reason to read it (what's in it for them to read through your offers?)
Step Eight
Guaranteed Traffic - Sign up for programs such as the Click Thru Network which allows you to surf other web sites in exchange for traffic on your own site with a 1:1 ratio. For every site you visit, you get one visitor in return.
If you happen to be own a blog, Blog Explosion is a group of bloggers who do this type of exchange. Sign up at Blog Explosion and once you are approved the exchange rate is 2:1 so for every 2 sites you visit, you get 1 visitor, but you also get a chance at random bonus visitors.
If you are using traffic exchange sources like these, be sure to have some form of a bookmark reminder or link or a newsletter subscription where it can be seen which will increase your chances that person will return when they are not doing the exchange surfing.
Step Nine:
Personal Touches - Signature Lines are a 1-3 line ad you use at the end of your email or when posting in newsgroups. If you are a regular in a certain newsgroup, people will start to pay attention to your offer when they feel they can trust you. That is a great way to get reliable, steady traffic, but it will take time until you build up credibility. When you have a good offer, start out first with those you know. Then expand to your Internet contacts you know from chat rooms, e-mail or other contacts. Use your ICQ, Yahoo MS Messenger or AOL Instant Message to meet new people to present your offer. People do listen to you when they feel you are a real person.
Under no circumstances should you go into a newsgroup, chat room, or message board just to spam. Know the group and get a feel for the personality of the group. Befriend them first and see if a small ad is accepted behavior before you post.
Step Ten:
Regularity - Be consistent. Set aside at least 3 hours a day/ 5 days a week when you are getting started on a campaign and taper it down to 2 hours a month when you start to see traffic. Don't use just one form of advertising, use them all. Keep testing different ads until you find the one that works. Most of these steps will make your ad campaign go on automatically without more effort from you.
Use time saving tools to help you post to some of the ffa and classified sites. You can get software such as Submission Wizard or Traffic Pro to help save your time. These will cost $99 each to use. Submission Wizard is good only for the time period in which you buy it (1, 2, 3, 6 months or 1 year.) Traffic Pro is one I would NOT recommend as they do upgrades which you must pay for AND they have lousy customer service and refuse to refund your money unless you go to the BBB to complain.
Search Engine Blaster is a web site where you can store up to 3 URLs to submit for free. You program your ad and check off the places you want your ad posted and the time to post. It will run automatically without further imput from you. You can purchase extra URLs for a small monthly fee.
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