The Five Most Powerful Forms of Internet Advertising
Posted by megri @ Thursday, July 15, 2004
The Five Most Powerful Forms of Internet Advertising
Copyright © 2004, Bill Platt
the Phantom Writers
http://thePhantomWriters.com
Webmasters and Entrepreneurs around the world are beginning to
learn first-hand the long-term value of using Promotional Ezine
Articles to promote their businesses in the online environment.
When you are promoting your website, there are five methods
that clearly occupy the top five positions in the ratings for
effectiveness. These methods are not listed in the order of
effectiveness, but rather in the order needed to share my story:
- Search Engine Listings
- Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Listings
- Website Advertising
- Ezine Advertising
- Free-Reprint Promotional Articles
SEARCH ENGINE LISTINGS
To get listed in the search engines does not have to cost you
money. I use Free Web Submission ( http://freewebsubmission.com )
for my own search engine submissions. This tool is provided for
us by Jayde Online, Inc.
Although their software submits only to the top 20 spider
search engines, it does provide direct links to the top 50
spider search engines.
PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH ENGINE LISTINGS
Overture ( http://overture.com ) is the largest of all of the
Pay-Per-Click providers. Google Adwords is another one of the
most powerful PPC providers ( https://adwords.google.com ).
With PPCSE's, you buy keywords or keyword phrases from the
provider. When your purchased keywords are placed into the
search engine query, your ad will appear in the paid listings
next to the global results.
With all systems, you only pay a fee if someone clicks your
link to visit your website. Google Adwords adds tougher criteria
to the basic model. Their software determines your CTR (click
through rate) to make sure your advertisement is living up to
the Adwords Display-to-CTR recommended ratio.
In addition, with Google Adwords, your purchased keywords must
be relevent to your offerings.
WEBSITE ADVERTISING
Most content driven websites offer advertising on their site.
Some sites offer their advertising at very reasonable rates,
while others offer ad rates that make them viable advertising
possibilities for only the largest businesses.
You should always select a website for your advertising where
you suspect people in your potential marketplace actually visit.
For example, with my business, writers are the people who buy
my services. So, I spend most of my advertising dollars to reach
writers. One of my most effective advertising outlets I use is a
site called Sell Writing Online at: http://sellwritingonline.com/
Another site I advertise on is Lyons International at:
http://www.lyonsinternational.com/
EZINE ADVERTISING
When you advertise in ezines (online newsletters), you run into
the same factors that you do with website advertising. Some have
high ad rates, while others do not. Some have high readership,
and some do not. And all of them target a certain segment of
our population.
When shopping ezines to advertise in, you should always target
the readers you hope to attract to your business. You should
also make sure that the cost of advertising is within your
budget and reaches the number of people that is needed to keep
your advertising cost-effective.
Generally, ezine advertising rates run in the range of $8 to
$18 per CPM. CPM is a publishers term that tells the Cost Per
Thousand subscribers. If a e-zine charges $8 per CPM and has
700,000 subscribers, then your cost to have your advertisement
sent to the whole list will run you a cool $5600 --- 700 x $8.
FREE-REPRINT PROMOTIONAL ARTICLES
Now, imagine if you could get your ad into dozens of ezines,
and imagine that you could do so for far less than the $5600
in our example.
By using Free-Reprint Articles as a tool to promote your
business you will begin to see your Classified Ad / Resource Box
in the reading sections of ezines of all shapes and sizes... and
all of your articles will appear in the ezines that most likely
will target your potential customers.
With a free-reprint article, you are doing the publishers a
favor by giving them quality reading materials that they can
share with their readers. At the end of each article is what
is called a "Resource Box". This resource box is like a short
"About the Author" piece that resembles a short classified ad.
As a general rule, the resource box should be limited to 6 lines
by 65 characters. By limiting the size of the resource box, the
writer is increasing his or her chance to see his or her article
in print.
When you write articles that are consistent with the topics that
your potential clientele will read, you are able to consistently
target the people you need to reach with your advertising.
SAVE THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WITH PROMOTIONAL ARTICLES
I have personally used Free-Reprint Promotional Articles for the
promotion of my own business for the last two and a half years
consistently, and for the past five years on an intermitant
basis.
My articles and the articles that I have distributed for my
clients have appeared thousands of smaller ezines which offer
inexpensive advertising and in hundreds of ezines which charge
thousands of dollars for advertising. As a bonus, our articles
are reprinted on thousands of websites of all shapes and sizes.
With just my own articles, if you were to count up the
advertising fees for the publications and the websites that
have published my articles, you would be able to see for
yourself that I have gotten tens of thousands of dollars in
free advertising in exchange for the small amount of time I
had invested in creating and distributing my articles.
Whether you write your own articles or pay a ghostwriter to
write your articles for you, the combined cost of creating
and distributing your article is far less than the value of
advertising that you will receive in exchange for the reprint
use of your article.
As a general rule, by using free-reprint articles to promote
your business, you can expect to gain $100 worth of free
advertising for every dollar you spend to create and distribute
your articles.
IN CONCLUSION
No other form of web advertising offers so much bang for the
buck as does using free reprint promotional articles. The value
gained from free reprint articles is big, and it is long-term.
I wrote my first promotional article in 1999 --- it is still
being published today on a regular basis.
With all other forms of advertising, you pay once and get
immediate results. Once your dollar is spent, you will never
earn any more value from that dollar --- it is long gone. With
reprint articles, your dollar will deliver results to you time
and time again.
The question I have for you is this. If you are not using free
reprint articles to promote your business, then why aren't you?
Resource Box:
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Bill Platt owns http://thePhantomWriters.com . Do you need
free content for your website or ezine? Our archives deliver
more than 500 free-reprint articles available for your use.
http://content.thePhantomWriters.com . Do you write your own
articles? Let us distribute them for you to our network of 6000+
publishers & webmasters http://thePhantomWriters.com/distribution
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More Web Promotion Resources:
Web Promotion Company India
Website Promotion Company India offering Web Promotion services
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