Advertise Not Using AdWords?
Kirt Christensen
Google Adwords and AdSense have become the rage in internet marketing, enough so that many have forgotten there are other means of advertising which can be equally successful and require the investment of much smaller amounts of capital.
For those who are unfamiliar with the method AdWords is what is known as a pay per click marketing venture; every time the advertisement is viewed the advertiser is charged a small fee.
The fee assessed is usually under a dollar; however it will rapidly compound to a large sum, especial if the clicks are on keywords that are popular and in high demand and will often return a higher number of 'false leads'. Just like casino gambling the payperclick gamble can take very little time to use up an advertising budget.
Luckily, as hard as this may be to believe, Google's game is not the only game in town. Adwords is also not the most widely used. A wise internet marketer who will look past Adwords will find the time wisely spent growing your profits not draining your budget.
The most simple and inexpensive way to advertise beyond Adwords is by using qualities found in social networking in the form of blogs and forums. Blogs and forums have community features that let web users to meet together to discuss topics that are of common interest. This gets your advertisement seen by people who are truly interested.
If an advertiser puts a post on a blog whose topic is related to his product or website, and in that post he includes a link to his website he can increase his websites exposure to people interested in what he sells. And he doesn't have to put out any cash.
Advertising on some other businesses website is another great marketing method. The trick comes in choosing the site to advertise on. The most important thing is to analyze with care his desired audience and find the sites they visit the most.
There are three methods of advertising on another individuals site.
The advertiser can opt to simply create a text or a banner ad and pay the site in question to post the ad (this may not be an improvement over the pay per click method unless they are willing to charge a standard fee for the amount of time it is displayed).
The other two methods utilize the power of strong web content. There are many companies who pay writers to create informational articles to be posted on their websites in order to improve their reputation and increase the number of visitors to their site.
Rather than being paid for writing an article a canny advertiser will write the article and offer this article for use on a related website as content in exchange for including the writers name and site info at the bottom as a resource box. This method is known as link building.
In order for link building to work optimally, the reader of the article has to actually finish the article, read the resource box, and then be curious enough to want to check out the writer's website. However you will be limited by the short length of time that the average internet user is willing to devote to any one thing.
Alternately, when you write your article you can include links to your site sprinkled throughout the article. So when one of these links, which are made on relevant words, catches the readers attention he can click and be taken to the related area of your site where they can get the further information they desired.
This is what is known as hosted web content; most other sites will charge a fee for this service, as it draws visitors away from their site.
Using the strategies we discussed internet advertisers can make a profit without risking getting cut by the double edged sword known as AdWords. Thus doing business and maintaining their pride and keeping their bank account whole.
About the Author:
Need to optimize or "fix" your Adwords & PPC campaigns? Kirt Christensen manages over $600k in PPC spending & knows what it takes to make your account hum! When you need an adwords consultant, he's the man!
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