|
|
Low Cost Promotion
by Matt Mickiewicz, webmaster@webmaster-resources.com
So you're sitting there and thinking "How can I possibly profit by spending
money on Promotion when my site is advertising supported?" Believe it or
not there are several extremely low cost ways to bring visitors running to your
site.
1. GoTo.com
Spending money on keyword advertising at http://www.GoTo.com. This search engine
allows you to bid on a per click-clickthrough basis to have your listing show up
at the top of the search results. The higher the bid the higher your ranking
under the keywords that you choose. You can bid as little as 1 cent/click. With
the $25 minimum purchase you can get 2500 extra visitors to your site, and if
every visitor views 3 pages that's an extra 7500 extra page views (and ad views)
for a mere $25. If you sell advertising at $20 CPM (per thousand impressions)
that means you made a 5 cents/visitor profit by advertising at GoTo.com
If you want a quick way to get dozens of extra visitors to your site (more more)
daily then GoTo.com is the way to go. Visit the "Get listed" page and
run a search for keywords relating to your site, choose a couple of popular
search phrases and buy them. The secret here it to choose popular keywords/phrases
that get used a couple dozen times a month, but have not been bidded on heavily.
Make sure you also read the article about my GoTo.com results.
Now your probably wondering why some companies shell out $40 CPM for banner
advertising on search engines when they can go and buy ads on Goto for as little
as 1 cent/click. There are several reasons for this:
- Advertising on GoTo.com does not brand your product or service like Banner
advertising does.
- GoTo.com doesn't even come close in its capacity to deliver as many visitors
as the other search engines do. Even the most popular keywords on Goto get used
only a couple thousand times a month.
- You can't target your ads by Operating System, time of day, specific days,
specific domains etc. like you can when you advertise on other search engines.
2. Search Engine Rankings
Investing in boosting your Search Engine ranking has many benefits as well. One
of the most cost effective, and most proven methods to increase your traffic is
to buy a copy of the WebPosition Gold Software.
This software tracks and reports back on your position in the major search
engines under keywords that you choose, and keeps track of how your rankings
improve or drop. Webposition Gold also includes a Page Critic which makes
suggestions on how to improve pages for specific search engines, a Page
Generator which generates doorway pages, a Submitter for submitting your site
and more. The software also includes a large, detailed guide on how to improve
your position. I've used this software, and it's absolutely great. A free trial
version is available.
3. Media Coverage
A slightly more risky promotion method is to send out a press release through a
company like NewsBureau.
If your site is newsworthy and you have a well written press release you could
potentially get lots of media coverage resulting in a huge boost in traffic to
your site. However it's also possible that your site won't get any media
coverage and you'll end up losing money. It's a risk that you will have to weigh.
Low Cost Promotion (continued)
4.) ClickTrade.com
Advertise on Clicktrade.com. They require that you deposit a minimum of $100
before starting an advertiser account. You could offer other sites as little as
$0.01/click for putting a link to your site. However you must be careful to
track down people who try to artificially inflate click counts. The volume of
traffic that this method of advertising can generate greatly depends on the
number of sites who put a link to your site, and their traffic. Of course the
more you offer per click, the more sites will put up a link to your site. One
last thing you should be aware of: cheating. You'll have to keep a very close
eye on sites that are linking to you to ensure that no fraudulent clickthrough
activity is occurring.
5.) Link-O-Matic
The fifth and final method of low cost promotion that I'm going to discuss here
is advertising on Free For All pages through LinkOMatic. I use this service to
promote my own site, and I am able to get visitors in the 5 to 10 cents/visitor
range. This greatly depends on how good the Title that you submit is good at
drawing clicks, and what your site is about. Nevertheless, a $100 investment in
a LinkOMatic account could bring up to 2,000 extra visitors to your site. The
downside of LinkOMatic is its inability to give you a huge predictable flow of
traffic. More likely then not those 2,000 extra visitors (if you even get that
many) will be spread out over the course of 6 months or so and the quality of
the traffic will be pretty low.
6.) Good Webhosting Company
Finally, make sure that the visitors you are paying for actually get to your
site, and are not met with a server that is down.
|
