Posts Tagged ‘affiliate programs’
Advertising Your Affiliate Programs
April 9th, 2009 | 
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With most affiliate programs you will receive textual ads and banners for online advertising placements. There are several free ways you can use these ads and banners.
One of the most popular ways are Traffic Exchanges. You register with various traffic exchange programs, upload your text ad or banner, and your banner will appear on various registered web pages throughout the world. The number of times you banner or text ad will show will depend on how many points or clicks you accumulate through “surfing” the traffic exchange. The more points or clicks you have the more your ad will be shown to others. This is a very effective method of advertising. It can be time consuming but doesn’t have to be…you just need to organize yourself to do 5-10 different exchanges each day.
Once you sign up for a traffic exchange bookmark the signup page in a folder with all exchanges. Then using Firefox as your browser, right click the folder, where it says “open all in tabs” click on that and all your exchanges will open. Sign in and start to surf.
Traffic exchanges are relatively easy to use and FREE!
The other two types of advertisement placements are online classifieds and paid placements.
Online classifieds is one of the easiest ways to get your product in front of customers on high traffic websites; and it can be done for FREE. Type in your search “online classified” or a similar phrase and look to see what the rules are for placing your advertisement or banner. Several major website will allow you to place classified ads for free. While others, like Yahoo, will charge a fee for placement. These can be very effective depending on the volume of ads being submitted at any given time. If it is a high traffic site, your ad will only appear for a matter of hours before it is pushed down by new advertising submissions. Daily attention and resubmission is necessary to an effective ad campaign on free sites.
Paid placement of advertisements is a very broad category and covers many different scenarios. You can do a PPC campaign (pay per click); where you only pay the site for clicks to your sales page. This can range anywhere from 0.05 to 5.00 a click, depending on what you are willing and can afford to pay. It is best before you start to read as much as you can about PPC campaigns because if you aren’t careful you can spend a lot of money very fast with little or no results. You must keep very close track of expenditure and income for this to work.
There are also the paid advertisement placement sites that will charge you a set fee to place your ad on their site for a designated period of time.
You can also use affiliate-networking sites to sell your products, but each site has different criteria so you would have to contact them directly to see what they offer in terms of tracking and costs. These too can become expensive unless you are an experienced marketer with a unique product to sell.
Ezine or E-magazines are another great source of free and paid advertising. Ezines can range from sites that will accept articles with your bio and link to your site for free. The advertising part comes in the form of that bio. Some sites will not allow you to put an affiliate link in the bio, that is another reason why in a previous article I suggested a “doorway page”.
There are also Ezines that have an opt-in option for you to receive emails from other clients. In exchange for you putting your article or advertisement on their site you will agree to receive emails from various members. This is not considered “spam” as you have to agree to receive this email before you can place your ad (word of advice, use a separate email account). This is all free advertising.
This is just a brief overview of the methods with which you can place your advertisements online. In all of these examples it is best to build your own content rich website. This will be the most effective for advertising.
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Elements of Free Advertising: Part 2
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!
