ADVERTISING
A LITTLE ABOUT ADVERTISING
YOUR WORK AT HOME BUSINESS
There are many different methods of advertising your home business. Some of these methods which I will touch on are:
Free Classifieds
Paid Classifieds
Free For All Pages (FFA)
Traffic Exchanges
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Banner Exchange
Although you will eventually want to pay for advertising, for the beginning marketer one of the most desired methods is “Free Advertising”.
There are thousands of sites that offer free or paid advertising for your work at home business. When just starting out with your own home business and your advertising budget is small, or non-existant like mine was, you may want to try some free advertising.
Although not the easiest form of advertising, you can build your home business with free ads. The major problem is that you have to post hundreds of ads every day in order to see results. As you can see, the keywords here are dedication, effort and don’t give up. This process is long and demanding and it will take some time before you start to see results.
There is software available which lets you post to free classified sites with the click of a mouse but you’ll have to search the internet to find it. There is one that is used by millions of online marketers which is available as a download (free trial period then a one time payment of $10.00) as part of the resources of this work at home program. (The program is also free to join by the way.)
There are probably thousands of home business entrepreneurs all looking to place free classified ads for their own products and opportunities so you will have to be creative in searching for sites to place your ads.
A few tips to find good sites would be:
- start on page 4 or 5 of the search results as the majority
of people will start on page 1 and you will have too much
competition;
- be specific when searching for sites to place ads on by using
search terms like ‘home business classifieds’ , or ‘work at
home ads’, or if you are selling something like pet shampoo
use ‘pet grooming ads’;
- don’t forget to use ‘free ezine ads’ as many newsletter
publishers will let you place free ads in their newsletter
simply by subscribing.
A word of caution about placing free ads. Before you start, please sign up for a free email account with an email provider such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or Lycos, and use that account as your email address when placing ads. The reason for this is that you will receive many, many spam emails once you start posting ads. Lots of spammers collect email addresses from free classified sites and try to hide their spam ads in emails with subjects like: ‘About Your Ad’, ‘I’m Replying To Your Ad’, or ‘More Info Please’. You will also get an autoresponse from the site you posted to confirming your ad and of course it will contain an ad of their own. You don’t want your personal email account bogged down with this stuff.
I'll list a few places that I use to place free ads, however be sure to search for your own as we don't want to saturate these sites:
Free-World-Classifieds.com
Free Classified Ads.com
Classifieds 1000.com
FFA Net.com
No More Hits.com
Click Thru.com
Classifieds For Free
Small Business FFA
Onelineads.com
04ads.com
All of the links above are free so you'll have to do some ad tracking to see if they are working for you.
Ad tracking is another feature you should look for when deciding to join a work at home affiliate program. In order to know which ad is working for you, you must be able to find out how many people are clicking on it.
For instance, the following link will take you to my affiliate program if you click on it: www.sfi4.com/7591931.104/free and because I have the tracking number (104) after my affiliate number, I will know that the visitor, you, came from my MLM Wonders web site.
There are hundreds of sites on the internet which offer ad tracking for a fee. Simply do a search for ‘Ad tracking’.
Not all Affiliate Programs will have such a system in place, however the good ones should. That is one of the reasons I highly recommend the SFI program to get your mlm home business up and running with quality products, excellent support and great training. All upgraded members are entitled to unlimited use of the ad tracking system.
We also have an excellent discussion board where every question you could possibly have about internet marketing has been or will be answered. The Discussion board also includes an excellent discussion about free advertising and a tutorial on how to use the above mentioned ad submission software. Plus it is always free to join and carries no obligations whatsoever! (Did I mention they have great training!)
FFA Sites - The FFA (Free For All) sites have varying degrees of success. I have written an article on using FFA sites effectively, you can read it here.
You will discover that the most effective use of FFA pages is to sign up for one yourself which will enable you to automatically send out your ad to everyone who posts an ad to your FFA site! This could get you hundreds of advertisements each day! You can also upgrade to paid member and more resources are available, such as the ability to collect email addresses of those who post. Why not give it a try, sign up for your own FFA site here and here and put your ad out to the thousands who will post their ads to it.
Traffic Exchanges - There are places which let you “buy” traffic to your web site simply by viewing other people’s sites and earning points. You then use these points to ‘purchase’ views of your site.
Places like No More Hits and Click Thru are good ones to join. Basically, you pick the catagories you like and then you simply view the advertisers site for a certain amount of time (usually around 30 seconds). This view gets you one credit which in turns usually buys you one showing of your site.
They are well worth your while to check out, even if you just surf to find more resources! These work for a lot of people, however, you must also remember that many of the people who will be viewing your site are also people trying to advertise their own sites so you’ll have to decide whether it is worth your time or not.
Banner Exchanges - are another great way to get your web site in front of hundreds or thousands of prospective customers. I have written a short tutorial on banner exchanges, click here to read it.
EMail Advertising - I mentioned above about collecting email addresses. You will soon discover that the best advertising you can do is to email lots of people. BEWARE, lots of people don't like to get unsolicited email (SPAM) and they could, and probably will, report you! You could lose your internet service, or worse, be liable to legal action.
So, how do you get email addresses? Quite simple really, offer your website visitors something useful! You could offer them to sign up for your newsletter, or to get access to free ebooks, or anything else that they must provide you with their email address to get. Click here to see this in action. An email will be sent to me, you will be added to my mailing list and you will receive an email back almost immediately with instructions on how to get your free ebooks.
Once you have their address, you can email them until they tell you to stop (always give them a way to remove themselves from your list). But please do not abuse your list members. I try to limit my emails to 2 a month (normally the newsletter and one followup).
You can also buy names from so-called List Brokers. Also be careful here, you don't always know where the names come from, how many times they have been sold or whether they are even looking for a business opportunity! Do your research! There are tons of legitimate sites out there who have excellent, targeted names for sale. Try to stay away from those that offer “Millions of ligitimate opt-in email addresses”. You’ll probably just get lots of spam complaints and bounced addresses.
SAFELISTS - A safelist is basically a list of names which has already been build by someone. Some are free to join and some are fee based.
The free ones will require you to register and then you will be able to email the list a limited number of times. About the only benefit of the paid lists is that you can email them more often. Remember, that you will also receive email from every member of the safelist so again, use your free email account when you register.
You can, however, build your own safelist by joining programs that are designed just for that purpose. Basically, you sign up and get as many people as you can to sign up under you. They in turn will get people to sign under them, and so on...you get to email your advertisements to the whole list. These are excellent programs. Here is one that I highly recommend: ResidualOptinProfits . It is free to join and you can get literally thousands of people building your list for you!
Article Submission - Are you an author? Do you like to write letters? Do you know something about anything? If you do, you can write an article.
If you ask any online marketing expert what is the most effective means of getting your website linked to from hundreds or even thousands of high profile web sites, they will tell you to write articles.
Writing articles is much easier than you think. Just write like you are talking to your friend about your favorite subject.
I wrote a home business startup article titled ‘Writing For Fame And Fortune’ just recently (click here to view it) and submitted it to about 30 sites that accept articles, and they in turn will offer it to their visitors to use on their sites. That could mean hundreds of links coming into my web site without me doing any more work.
Once you write your article, you will want to submit it to many sites which accept article submissions. The following URL is a site which lists several sites that accept articles:
www.softwaremarketingresource.com/article-submission.html
To get you started I offer the following few sites that you can submit your articles to:
Virtual-Professionals.com ™
www.articlesubmission.com
www.businessknowhow.com
www.buzzle.com
www.ezinearticles.com
http://thewhir.com/find/articlecentral/suggest.asp
www.addme.com/nlsubmit.htm
www.advertisingknowhow.com
www.amazines.com
www.articlecity.com
www.article-emporium.com
www.ebooksnbytes.com
www.family-content.com
www.goarticles.com
www.ideamarketers.com
www.marketing-seek.com
www.smallbusinesshowto.com
www.vectorcentral.com
http://womans-netnews.com
http://searchwarp.com
www.netpreneur.com
Submit your articles for free and get results
from hundreds of webmasters, ezine publishers, readers online.
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OffLine Advertising - And don't forget about offline advertising! There are hundreds of places in YOUR town where you can put up advertisements. Here are just a few:
- Mall Bulletin Boards - I use this one quite often as it brings results. If your affiliate program has offline ads for you to use then put them up. I tape an envelope to the bottom of the flyer and print out one or two line "tear offs" with my affiliate link on them and put them in the envelope, that way people can grab one and take it home with them so they won't forget my web address. I put something like this on them:
WORK AT HOME - www.sfi4.com/7591931.300/free
(Remember the ad tracking I told you about above, notice that I use a different number, .300, in my offline ads. I could go even further and put .301 for the local mall, .302 for the strip mall down the road, etc.)
- Laundrymats - These are boring places so put your flyers up there and make sure you keep replenishing your tear offs. Also, keep the flyers up high enough so they are out of reach of children!
- Parking lots are a source of prospects. Make sure you check with the mall owners before you put flyers on vehicles as some don't want you to do this.
- Business Cards - probably the most often used form of offline advertising! If you have a colorful, professionally done business card then people will hang on to it much longer than they would those plain white cards. Here is a place I found recently where you can get 250 professional, high quality business cards for FREE:
Click here.
Here is a copy of my business card which I got for free through the above link:
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