Copyright ? Steve Gitto
Are you thinking of starting your own internet business? How do you plan on advertising the product or service that you are promoting? The cost of advertising alone can make or break your business and creating an advertising budget is crucial to the success of your internet marketing venture.
Budgeting advertising dollars can be a difficult thing for most beginning internet entrepreneurs. The problem is that your own money is used to fund the business which usually comes in the form of a credit card and if you are not careful you could find yourself in loads of debt later on.
It doesn't take an "internet marketing guru" to tell you that, "you have to spend money to make money", right? Unfortunately, most of us feel that way so we blow all kinds of money on e-zine advertising in hopes that the .1% of the 100,000 that you are advertising to will find your product or service useful. Mind you that .1% of 100,000 potential customers doesn't sound so far fetched but when you think about it 100 buying customers could put you in profit! You see, it's the "potential profit" which makes e-zine advertising so attractive to most beginners and too many bank on it too early in there internet marketing career.
Free advertising has it's advantages and disadvantages. Even though it's more cost effective it can be more time consuming and most beginners don't have a choice. Some forms of free advertising include posting in forums, setting up your own blog, writing and submitting articles to article directories, and using traffic exchanges.
Forums are a great way to advertise because you can use what is a called a sig file or signature. Your sig file can be set up as a link to your website and everytime time you post a message your sig file will always be at the bottom of the message for someone to click!
Writing and submitting articles to article directories and blogs are useful because it creates one way links back to your website helping improve your website ranking in the search engines. Writing articles isn't for everyone but for about $20 per month you can have someone write them for you.
Traffic exchanges are a quick way to increase traffic to your website. How it works is when you click on someone else's ad you earn credits to your account which in turn allows others to see your ad. Most traffic exchanges are free to use with a paid upgrade version available. If you have about an hour a day, you can literally earn thousands of hits per month to your website using traffic exchanges alone. You can also build downlines in these programs and earn a percentage of their traffic which will help you leverage the time that you spend surfing for credits.
Free advertising can be effective IF you have the time and the patience. But more importantly it will allow you to promote your product without spending a dime in your budget and also it will keep your sanity in check when the credit card bill arrives in the mail. |
