Friday, April 25, 2008

Advertise Not Using AdWords?

By 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 people who do not know it, Ad Words is a marketing business offering payperclick advertising. With every viewing of the advertisement the person who posts the ad is assessed a minor 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.

Fortunately, contrary to popular belief AdWords is not the only means of advertising on the internet; as a matter of fact, it is not even the most commonly used technique. There are many ways with which to skin a cat, and the internet marketer intelligent enough to step beyond the boundaries of AdWords will quickly find their profits growing without the continual draining of their budget.

The simplest and least expensive method of advertising without AdWords is to utilize the powers of social networking through blogs and forums. Each of these is a community feature, which allows web surfers to come together to discuss topics that are of great interest to them, and the exposure is unbelievable.

As they post on a blog whose topic is relative to their product if an advertiser includes a link to his webpage, he can raise the quantity of visitors to his site without paying any ppc charges.

One other method is to post an advertisement on another businesses website. Your choice of sites is the thing to focus on, and the use of careful analysis to discover sites that people interested in your subject might visit often is important.

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).

Good web content is the basis for the other two methods. In the one way a writer is paid to write articles full of information on a specified topic, that ties in to the advertisers website, to post on the advertisers site to raise his sites credibility with search engines and thereby increase his traffic.

Instead of charging a fee the savvy advertiser will create an article in this manner and approach the creator of said website, offering to allow them to absorb the article into their website in exchange for including their name and site information on the bottom. This is what is known as link building.

Actually, link building works best when the reader in reality finishes the article completely. They also have to enjoy the article enough to want to see if the author has anything else available. But with how limited the attention span of the majority of internet users, the likelihood is low.

Another way is to write the article with links to informational location on your own site sprinkled through the article. So when the reader comes to an idea they want to know more about they can click on it and they can go directly to your site where there is more information.

Because this type of article, aka hosted web content, takes visitors away from their site it is most likely that you be charged a fee for the display of it.

By utilizing all of these strategies internet marketers can turn a profit away from the dangerous appeal of AdWords, walking away from the deal with their pride and their wallets intact.

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