Lessons In Paid Advertising - A Must Read

Lauren

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Direct Sales Helpers News
Tips you can use!
August 14th, 2008
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Editor's Notes
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First a quick apology for sending this a day late - this week has been a bit on the crazy side! Between sickness, internet issues, construction on the house, and getting the kids ready for school, it's been near impossible to get work done online.

Second, we have a pretty major announcement we'd like to make. DirectSalesHelpers has officially been put on the market. Yes, we are selling the website and business. We are going to do our best to make sure it gets a wonderful new owner though, and that the success tips continue. If you are interested in buying the business or know someone that is, you can see the listings here.

To your success!

~Kara Kelso & Anita DeFrank~
http://www.DirectSalesHelpers.com

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Lessons In Paid Advertising - A Must Read
by Kara Kelso and Anita DeFrank

Paid advertising is getting a bad name online. The problem isn't with the advertisers though, it's with the target and tracking.

If it's not requests for free advertising, it's a request for low cost. No one wants to pay more than a few bucks to advertise their business these days. Mostly because of past experiences and advice from others have said "bad idea".

If you aren't marketing your business, you aren't going to get far. Many know one of our favorite forms of marketing is SEO, but that's still not enough. At some point you are going to need to step out of your box and put a little more money into your business.

We're not going to even touch on PPC ads, because it's been done to death. Although do keep in mind this is one way to get traffic (very targeted at that) to your website. What the focus of this article is about though is website advertising.

When you see ads that cost $5 or less, it might be tempting to jump on them. Why not? It's so little to invest, right? Wrong. It's easy to get carried away with the cheap ads, thus pouring in hundreds of dollars without even realizing it.

Before you pay for another "cheap ad", take a step back and use this checklist first:

1. Is the site targeted?
If you are trying to sell candles on a recipe site, you aren't going to have much luck. You know your customers, so go to where they hang out. If you are selling make-up, search for beauty sites. Selling natural products? Check out natural living sites.

Also, it's rarely a good idea to attempt to sell consumer products on wahm sites. Instead you want to promote business related products, or your business opportunity.

Bottom line - make sure the site is TARGETED.

2. How much traffic?
If they don't know how many unique visitors and page views a day the site receives, then don't even think of handing them money. Tracking your stats is a basic in business, and they shouldn't be selling advertising if they don't know.

Even if you can't afford the ads on bigger sites, do a comparision check to see how much sites as a whole are selling based on their visitors. (Hint: Divide the cost by visitors per month to get a general idea of "cost per visitor" - this will make it easier to compare side by side).

3. Hits are not Visitors!
This is one of the biggest red flags out there. If the site is going on about how many "hits" they get in a day, RUN. Hits are NOT visitors...they aren't even page views!

A "hit" is calculated whenever a file or a graphic loads on a page. If the webmaster has 5 graphics per page and looks around at 10 different pages on their site, they just added 50 "hits" to their site. To turn around and brag they have 500 "hits" a day is VERY misleading for the advertiser. It's unlikely your ad will even be seen by 10-20 visitors a day, which is barely worth your month.

*Some Extra Math*

Some think PPCs cost to much, and it's just not worth 10 cents or more per click. You think flat rate ads on websites are more cost effective, but the truth is you may be paying more.

For example, let's say you are advertising on a site that gets only 500 unique visitors a month. You will most likely not see more than 25 visitors from this ad. If you paid $5 for the ad, that just cost you 20 cents per click.

Still think PPCs are expensive?

The good news is you CAN get cheaper ads from websites. It just takes a bit of math to figure what's worth it and what's not. Following the basic guidelines above, you can easily get more out of flat rate ads than PPCs.

If you need some help finding flat rate ads that are worth it, be sure to check out Adbrite. They give you the stats from these sites from their own server, so you know exactly how many visitor a day each site gets. No "hits" reports either - just page views and visitors. Join AdBrite here.

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Published By:
Direct Sales Helpers
Kara Kelso & Anita DeFrank