Advertising

Everyone should have a budget for their advertising. Budgeting monthly is probably more manageable and you can keep control much better, especially if you are new like me. I do not have a great deal of disposable income and I dare say a large majority of people are the same.

Your budget may be $100, $50 or $5, like me there may be times when it is $0, however much you have, it is more important that you make it work as hard as possible for you.

Use the google search engine for Classified Advertising, ads on-line or FREE Advertising and you will get lots of leads to follow up.

A word of warning....I have found that when it says FREE it is not always FREE!! You go on to the site, set up a free account, completing an on-line form, place the ad and then you find that you have to pay a nominal amount to proceed. I wish there was more honesty on the internet!! If you are required to pay why not say it upfront. I wouldn't necessarily be put off if it said from the outset that there was $39, $19 etc. to pay.

One ad I clicked on requested payment of $1. I duly completed the on-line form, clicked to pay the $1 then it came up with add-ons and I couldn't close the site down. There were in fact 2 more add-ons.

This is time consuming so don't forget to make a note of the website addresses that you are unable to use so that if you come across the site again you will know to avoid it thus saving yourself quite a lot of time and energy and frustration.

It is a good idea to set up a database with relevant information for each advertisement you have placed. Basic stuff you might think but hindsight is a wonderful thing and more often than not we get caught up and carried along when placing ads and find that we can't quite remember what we have done and where we have done it, let alone what user name we used and the password to go with it.

So on the spreadsheet have a column for the name of the advertising company/traffic exchange, website address, user name, password, email address used, membership number, affiliate number, what ad you have placed, the business promoted and the final column should have the expiry date of the ad placed. Colour code these for each months' expiry date, it will be easier to check up on what needs to be renewed. (i.e. red for January, green for February, yellow for March, etc you get the idea). A column stating amount paid or free will help with the additions so you wont blow the budget.

Another tip from me... set up a google mail account or other especially for advertising. You could use the name of your blog as the account name, if you are promoting debt, then you could try getdebtfree@ you get my drift and use that when setting up the adverts and use the same user name and password for everything then you are less likely to forget them.

On the other hand if you have many websites a general term may be better i.e. joinpeter@ or workwithme@ or information4u@.

Keep away from using your private email address because once you start setting up advertisements you will find that there will be a snowball effect and you will start receiving emails from people wanting information, others may want see if you would like to advertise with them, there may be one or two cranks aswell. If you use a traffic site you will immediately be bombarded by emails from their membership with links for you to look at. You can sometimes reciprocate and send them information about your business.

All this does take time but we have seen an increase in traffic to one of our sites since we started promoting it this way.

Do not forget the importance of a using keywords in your advertising, headlines with 2-3 keywords in the title will get picked up by the search engines. A keyword loaded headline like – make money online had 110,000 searches in July, make money had 673,00, making money had 246,000, how to make money had 165,000.