Finding affordable outlets to advertise in/on is 90% of the battle if you’re an internet marketer with a teeny, tiny budget – as the majority are. Last week, I wrote a three-part series on internet marketing that’s kind of morphed into an unofficial six-part series.
This is the “unofficial” fifth installment. Today, I’ll tell you how I go about finding affordable online outlets to market your products/services.
Note: I’m a freelance writer and I primarily write and self-publish ebooks on/about freelance writing. The reason I point this out is, it’s easier to find affordable outlets for some niches than others. However, you can put the following tips into practice no matter what your niche is.
Popular Blogs/Websites: The first thing I do is check out popular blogs and websites in my niche. If you’re actively involved in your niche – to the point where you’re thinking about spending money on advertising – then you probably know of quite a few popular blogs and websites in your niche.
This is a great starting point for where to spend your advertising dollars. The thing about online advertising is that it’s much cheaper than traditional advertising, so even sites and blogs that get lots of traffic can be relatively easy to afford.
Google It! Once you’ve exhausted the above method, the next thing you should do is conduct some internet research. I start by typing in popular keyword phrases for my niche. And, Google is amazing for this.
I use Google like this. Some popular keyword phrases for my niche of freelance writing — in addition to “freelance writing jobs” — are publishing jobs, editing jobs, online writing jobs, copyediting jobs, etc. When you use Google to type in a keyword term, you will notice that as you’re typing, it lists the number of results for that phrase in the box just below.
This is invaluable information.or one, it tells you how popular a search is. And most importantly, it gives you other keyword phrases you may not have even thought of. This is in essence a keyword discovery tool – and it’s free!
How to Check a Site’s Traffic to See If It’s Worth Advertising On
Once I get the results for the phrase I type in, I simply start visiting sites and checking out how popular they are. Some online tools I use to check a site’s traffic are Alexa.com and statbrain.com. Sometimes I might check their page rank, although I take this with a grain of salt.
Rates for advertising on sites/blogs are all over the place. For example, when I was checking out sites to advertise my ebooks on, I found some sites that only get a few hundred visitors a day charging $75-$150/month for an ad, while other sites that got a few thousand visitors a day were only charging $25 — for three months!
In my niche, to get 1,000-3,000 visits a day is good, whereas in another niche, those might be paltry numbers. So you must do your research and judge for yourself. This means knowing how large your particular niche is, so you can judge what is actually good amount of traffic.
Note: At the end of yesterday’s post, I talked about how to tell if an ad is successful and promised to expand upon this point more today. This will be included in tomorrow’s post, when I’ll talk very specifically about ad placement — eg, how long your ad should run, how to compose it and how to parse sales numbers.
Share with others