How
to get thousands of dollars worth of advertising for pennies!
By
Marc Goldman
© Copyright 2003
Fact: If you want to grow your business
you need to advertise.
So why doesn't everyone do it? You may have heard the old saying: in order
to make money you have to spend money. Well, therein lies the problem. Most
people don't want to spend a single dollar on advertising. Then they wonder
why their business makes no money at all.
Now, advertising can take many shapes and forms but the methods that cost
little or none are usually the choice for the guerilla marketer on a shoestring
budget. As a matter of fact, many smart, multimillion dollar direct marketers
prefer to leverage free and low cost advertising techniques to get them where
they are (and keep their feet firmly planted there as well).
There are many advertising techniques that cost little or no money: per inquiry
advertising (paying for ads only when a lead or order results); joint venture
marketing (leveraging off other peoples resources - ie sending an endorsed
mailing to their customer list recommending your product or service); writing
articles positioning yourself as an expert or participating in an advertising
co-op.
Many people have no idea about advertising co-ops, but they are one of the
best ways out there to buy advertising at reduced prices (almost pennies
on the dollar) by SHARING the costs with others.
For instance, you could purchase a postcard in a card deck (one of my favorite
forms of advertising) for $1,700.00 or...you could get a group of people
to go in on the price of the card and divide up the card into sections of
ads.
OR...
You could purchase a full page ad in a magazine such as Home Business or
Entrepreneur or Investors Business Daily (depending on your target market),
share in the costs with others and divide up the page real estate so that
you all benefit.
Now...an ad in some magazines costs thousands (sometimes tens of thousands
of dollars), but by using the group buying power of a co-op you can now get
your ad in front of thousands of eyeballs for a fraction of the cost.
Interested?
It gets better.
Lots of people know about these offline advertising ideas but have no idea
how to put them into action online.
Here is a simple way you can leverage off the power of advertising co-op's
in your online marketing efforts:
1. Put together a co-op of other advertisers selling similar but non-competitive
products. Decide on the group budget.
2. Find advertising mediums that can send a LOT of targeted traffic to you
in a short amount of time. Some examples that come to mind right away are
payperclick search engines, such as overture.com or google ad words, guaranteed
visitor services, banner advertising, exit exchanges (buying views as opposed
to participating in free ones), and even ezine advertising.
3. Set up a rotator tool that sends an EQUAL amount of traffic to each
participant. This way you can make sure that each participant pays the same
amount, everyone receives the same amount of traffic and no one feels slighted.
(There are also ways to WEIGHT each person in the rotator so that if someone
pays more than the other participants they can receive more traffic than
the other participants, but I feel that to operate this fairly, each person
should pay the same amount and receive the same amount of traffic).
The only rotator tool we recommend is The Ultimate Rotator available at
The Ultimate Marketers
Resource. It's easy to setup -- all you do is enter up to 20 different
urls, then hit update and the software creates one URL for you to send traffic
to and each hit causes the next url in the rotation to be displayed.
4. Craft an ad that is generic but full of benefits and speaks to the WANTS
of your target market. It is extremely important that you have a skilled
copywriter on board to ensure the best results for your ad. I highly recommend
that the person who is best at writing ads or creating banners, popups etc.
be placed in charge of the copy and creative services - you can even offer
to cover their ad costs in exchange for doing the creative work.
5. Purchase the ad and send the traffic to the one rotator url.
6. Sit back and benefit from the traffic you received for pennies on the
dollar.
Will this guarantee you a thunderous roar of leads and sales? No, of course
not... you have to have good copy on your site, and a system that converts
visitors into prospects and prospects into sales, but you will never get
that if you don't start by getting the traffic.
Co-op advertising is the best way I know of to get thousands of visitors
to your website for little or no cost.
* POWER TIP *
Now, if you are the person who controls the rotator tool (eg if you are a
UMR member and you are using the Ultimate Rotator), you can organize the
co-op, charge others to participate, and get your ad for free.
It's all about leveraging what you don't have (lots of money) to get what
you want (lots of advertising). And it's a simple process to follow. Now,
you can be the person who gets thousands of dollars worth of exposure for
your business for next to nothing (or even better - nothing)!
About the Author:
Article by Marc Goldman, Goldbar Enterprises. For access to the most incredible
compilation of marketing tools ever put together you must become a member
of the Ultimate Marketers Resource. The UMR is the only place online where
you can get 30 tools that will provide you with an endless stream of leads,
subscribers and sales and tear your competition to shreds.
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