How to advertise on the internet?
By: Brendan Fitzpatrick
Hi Folks, I have addressed this topic indirectly a few times in other articles but I think this topic alone warrants it’s own article so here it is.
I’m going to quickly turn this article around and ask YOU, what is it that you want to sell? Regardless of your answer you should check out ebay.com, for relatively low overhead you can sell almost what you want to anyone in the world and eBay will walk you through the process. However, this doesn’t answer the title of this article. I will assume that you are past eBay and craigslist and the various other sites that enable you to sell product and now you are seeking more of a direct advertising campaign to cutout the middlemen.
So back to my question, what is it that you want to sell? For all intents and purposes I will call whatever you want to sell a ‘product’. If your product sells for a profit of 50 cents USD or as high as $500,000 USD there is a wide range of solutions for you and you need to figure out what works for your product.
Typically, the CTR is only a few percent – this means for every 1000 visitors that a % of those visitors will click on a link (ie. Buy button). So if it costs you just 5 cents per click you need to figure out if it’s worth it to pay $50 USD for a few clicks to buy your product. Good luck finding a site that will only charge 5 cents per click, they are usually higher than that so if your profits are small you need to start thinking about other forms of advertising than paying for clicks.
If you’re selling mortgages and making $500,000 per sale then you can probably afford $10 per click if you receive an order out of every 1,000 visitors. The trick is to find out where your site lies and what you can afford to pay to generate paid for traffic. This is common sense but often take a trial and error test to prove your theory. Be sure to limit your spending with search engines by day, most sites will allow you to spend $100 total but no more than $10/day (for example), this is a great way to test your product.
Most importantly, view my SEO article to maximize your natural search engine results which will maximize your free traffic here.