Elements of Free Advertising: Part 2

March 29th, 2009 |

Author: Nancy

No matter if you are using free advertising or paid advertising all online advertising is composed of four basic elements.

1. You need an ad
2. You need a website address (URL) to point the ad to or an email address
3. You will need to prepare for the posting process
4. You will need a location to place the ad

Most affiliate programs have pre-written ads for you to place at various ad sites. You will need to read the guidelines for each program to make sure you follow them. Use the URL given to point the buyer to the appropriate website. If you have a website of your own, some affiliates will point their ads to that URL.

For most people writing these ads is the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even though most programs have their ads set up, there are still some that don’t. Take a moment to thoroughly check out the website you want to promote, then take a few key points and you will have your ad. Write them down in notepad, and play around with the wording until you like the ad. Then try it out. Just remember it is not rocket science, if you have ever written an email to a friend you can write an ad. It really is that simple!

Whether you ad is designed to point to a URL or an email address, all free or paid ad locations require that you submit an email address to the ad site in order to post an ad. That is why it is highly recommended that you have a secondary email address for just this purpose. When you post a FREE ad on any of these sites your email address will get harvested for all sorts of emails, including spam. At no time use your primary email address when submitting to any free ad site, always use your secondary.

In addition many sites require that you submit an address and a phone number to post an ad, most times you will get away with just putting N/A in the required fields. There are some issues involved with this type of service that you will have to resolve for yourself, but remember that what ever information is given to this advertising site, is in reality giving the hosting company of that site a lead for their business offers. Some people do not give real phone numbers or addresses to avoid just this type of junk mail, but it is not recommended.

Once you have started to place your ads on these free sites you will need some type of tracking system. This is a very important step. You need to know which ads are producing and which are not. This is a very simple piece of code that you can put at the end of each url and it should tell you where the ads are coming from. For example: http://NKraska.MyWorldMoms.com/?SOURCE=blog; if you were to click on this ad it would take you to my sales page, but it will tell me in my account stats that I had a click from this post. It is that tiny bit of code at the end: (/?SOURCE=blog) that tells me where the customer clicked on my ad. Different affiliate programs have different code to track, so always check with the program. This particular code will not always work with individual affiliate programs.

All of your affiliate programs will have a stats page to show you where your clicks are coming from. It is a good idea to make a spreadsheet of some sort on your desktop with all the ad sites, and login information as you sign up. Then as you get further into free advertising you can set up your own system to keep track of your click throughs.

Nancy Kraska Owner of Home Work For You, . Avid reader. A food-alcoholic. Sometimes Crafter.

Stay tuned to Part #3—The Quest for FREE Ad Sites!

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