Advertising Ideas And Tools
Media Advertising
Advertising on media has lots of power because people use media everyday
in order to keep themselves inform of an event such as news, shopping,
education, or entertainment. The most popular medias are television,
radio, newspaper, and magazine. Advertise on these types of media is
very expensive, specially on television, but it gives good results. In
this section, I will show you the tools you can use to advertise on
newspapers and magazines without expending lots of money.
MediaBids
With Mediabids you can buy advertising by creating an auction and
letting the magazines and newspapers compete for your advertising
dollars. You can also buy ads without creating an auction. The auction
idea is because here you can setup a budget and the newspaper or
magazine company have to bid not higher than your budget. Also check for
the advertising specials Mediabids has on the front page.
SpotRunner
Here you buy a personalized TV ad that you can submit to many television
stations in United States. Buying the personalized TV ad cost around
$400 and you get your ad for a little as $6. Very cheap. SpotRunner will
sell you spot on many national television and you can even target your
audience. CNN, ESPN, Golf Channel, Fox, TBS, HGTV, History Channel, and
much more. You can advertise on those television stations paying around
$22 even lower. The lowest price I saw was $6 to put a spot on HGTV of
Evanston, IL.
Publicity Articles and Press Releases
Sending informative articles to print medias is one good method of
advertising you website indirectly, but free. Whenever you write an
informative article, it has to look interesting for the media and the
audience in order to get your article published. Never try to advertise
your website directly in your articles, but try to include it in your
article. Be smart doing this or your article will not be published.
Another similar way to advertise your website is through press
releases (PR). You can contract a press release company to help you do
the job or you can do it yourself. Below is few companies that can help
you getting your press releases. I will list paying companies and free
companies, so you decide about how much money you are willing to invest.
If you do not have enough knowledge; you can look some press release
articles and use them as samples to write yours. Press Releases are so
important because they will bring you the opportunity of advertising
your website for free through media like television, radio, and the
internet.
PRWeb,
PRLeap,
IdeaMarketers,
i-NewsWire,
24-7 Press Release,
PR.com,
PRFree,
Pressbox.
Advertising On Your Vehicle
Using your vehicle to place your own ad will give you unlimited
impressions. You can place a signs and graphics on any glass, door,
trunk, or hook of your vehicle. You can use companies like
FastSigns,
DomainPlates.com,
Drivertise.com, or you can look
up on your local yellow pages for companies that make signs for
vehicles. License Plate Advertising. Here you have to option to
advertise on your license plate. Option one, you can buy a personalized
license plate at your DMV or Department of Motor Transportation.
Personalized license plates are not expensive and that will help you
boost your business by displaying your business name or website URL.
Option two, add a new license plate frame. On the license plate frame
you can ad your business name and slogan. You can also add your website
URL. Here you will have two lines and you can choose the size, color,
and character of the letters to be displayed. To buy a set of frames at
LicensePlatesOnline.com
adn click on
custom license plate frames. You can also check your yellow pages
for a listing of local companies.
Online Advertising
If you have a website you can submit your website to search engines and
directories. The most popular search engines and directories where you
have to put more effort to get listed, are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and dmoz.
But that's not enough, you have to build an strong presence by adding
your website to other search engines and specially directories, so can
can earn link popularity and receive more traffic.
Just
click here to manually submit your website to search engines and
directories. If your business does not have a website; you still can
add your business to online yellow pages like
Yahoo! Local,
SmartPages,
SuperPages, etc. Another thing
that you can do is buy ads online. Buying ads can get you where you want
to be and the prices are from low to very high. It depends where are
buying your ads from. My recommendation is
AdBright.com because it has a huge
inventory of well known online websites. If you have a blog on your
website; you can ping to all blog search engines and blog directories
every time your blog is updated. You can get good ping service totally
free from Pingoat.com. You can
promote your website on forums and discussion boards as well. Just be
careful with spamming. There's some websites that let you post ads for
free. Websites like classifieds or forums websites like
PostYourAdForFree.com.
Search Engine and Directory Submission
Submit your website to search engines and directories. For best result,
it is recommended that you manually submit your website to search
engines and directory to the right category. Most search engines and
directories offer free submission.
CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO SEARCH ENGINES AND DIRECTORIES
Articles Distribution
Create or buy articles with the keyword that you want to advertise.
Example, if you have a payday loans website then you should write some
articles about it or find someone who can write them for you. I do
recommend that you submit about 50 articles related to the keyword that
you are advertising. If you do not want to write the articles than go to
GetAFreeLancer.com or
GetACoder.com and post a project asking for articles about the
keyword that you are advertising. You must mention that the articles
that you are buying are for redistribution. After you get the articles,
that you will distribute, at the bottom of every articles you should ad
the link of the website that your are promoting. See example below.
After all your articles are ready to distribute then go to
iSnare.com. They will submit your articles to a network of 1500
niche content sites. There you must buy credit to distribute your
articles. 1 = $2 You only need one credit per article. Also many
websites are looking for articles to add to their own website, so you
will getting a link back every time your article is posted to another
website.
One Way Link Exchange
In this step you will buy a membership at the IndexGuy link exchange.
Link exchange is not a good practice, but you can buy this account
because is like paying to directory to get your website added in certain
category.
Click here to go to IndexGuy.com and shop for a membership. I
personally recommend the Monthly Silver
for $24.95 a month and you will get 3422 inbound links (This number is
daily increasing). The most popular link exchange is
Link Market, but I believe that
the price to advertise is more expensive. If you are going to use link
exchange then follow the most popular website to add your link as an
advertiser or premium account. It's not a good idea setup a link farm in
your website because your site will get banned, from search engines,
sooner or later. What you can do is trying to get a presence on many
websites as you can, in order to increase site visitors at least by 1%.
Always look for that company that will let you set up a premium account
to advertise your website without having to link back. That way you will
be building a one way link the clean way. Here again the best links
exchange websites to add your link.
Link Market, Link Exchanged,
Link Referral,
Index Guy.
Email Signature
Place two lines of text as your email signature. In those two like you
must try to convince the readers to visit your website or purchase your
products. See a little image of the signature that I use to promote my
website.
Email
If you have a website; use your website email instead of some body else
email. You do not want to advertise any body else website, just yours.
Make sure you do not send spam, but you can keep in contact with
customers and family and at the same time your website URL is getting
advertised.
Buying Clicks and Impressions
The faster way to deliver visitors to your website is by buying click
and impressions. Pay per click can give you good result on you RIO, but
it can also be disaster to your wallet In September 2004, I spent
$700.00 in paid per click on Overture.com without getting a single sale.
All the money was just wasted. Here are some problems that you might
face if using pay per click as advertising method. The most common
problem is that most pay per click has a network of website that deliver
result through affiliate programs. Many of those affiliates want money
and they will do anything to get it, so they find ways to deliver fake
hits to your website. You will get hits, but not sale because in many
occasions, affiliates use robots to generate those hits and you might
not even notice it. The concept of pay per click is made in a way that
will benefit the publisher, but not the advertiser. The $0.02 that you
pay today; it will be $0.35 tomorrow. Some companies even pay $10.00 per
click just to get on the top position. If you decide using pay per
click, make sure you setup a budget daily or monthly, but at least you
know how much money you are spending. Do not get desperate trying to get
the higher position on the search engine. That's the game to make you
spend more money. Set up a small budget and track the results to see if
it works for you or not. The most popular website for buying click is
Google Adwords where you can bid for keywords and even target your
visitors without having you to spend extra money. People get a lot of
fake visitors in Google Adwords as well, so the best thing that you can
do is use the tools Google has for you and try to place your website in
other websites related to yours. Remember to target your visitors for
better result. If you want better result, but slower then buy ads at
other major websites like AdBright because those websites charge you
only a flat fee to display your banner or text link don't matter if you
get click or not, but at least you know for sure that you will spend and
where your ad will be displayed. You can also buy clicks at those pay to
click, pay to read emails websites. Those websites do not deliver good
results, but if you are looking to target opportunity seekers then those
are the best places to find them. Following is the list of recommended
website where you can buy clicks or impressions:
Google Adwords,
Yahoo! Marketing,
MSN,
Mamma, Ask,
AdBright.
Offline Advertising
A good institution that can help you with advertising is your local
chamber of commerce. Usually all chamber of commerce members trade
business cards at their local businesses or let you each place some type
of advertising. You can make your own business cards and make sure you
always carry some with you wherever you go. A good software you can
download to create your own business cards is
Business Card Designer Plus, but if you do not want to make your own
business cards then you can hire a company to design the business cards
for. You can do that online at
VistaPrint.com. Not only business cards, but you can also have your
business name on your mailing address, checks background, etc.
Customized Products
You make products with your business name, logo, or slogan to advertise
it offline. You customized products for yourself, family, friends, or
even to sell them. Some of the hot products that you can customized are
caps, t-shirts, pens, pencils, bump stickers, magnetic business cards,
can coolers, flyers, and many more. Below is a list a company websites
that you can visit to see what you like best for your business.
Berda.com,
Branders.com,
GImpressions.com,
PromoPeddler.com,
4PromoProducts.com,
ActionPrintingInc.com,
plasticpromotions.com,
buypromoitems.com,
motivators.com,
customink.com,
zazzle.com