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EXPERIMENTING WITH FREE MARKETING PROGRAMS
by: Cary Christian
As most of you know by now, I'm a firm believer in the basics of Internet
marketing. These include traffic from the search engines, pay-per-click
search engines, building a list for email marketing, ezine ads, and
reciprocal links. I believe these forms of marketing should form the
foundation of all your marketing efforts. They are your bread and butter.
However, I do not want to make you think that you should not try out new and
innovative techniques and programs that are frequently introduced online.
Even the most seemingly ineffective marketing techniques can be useful if
used in the right manner. Learning how to use them involves experimentation
and, in most cases, they cost nothing but time to try out. Let's look at a
couple that might be worthwhile and one you should avoid at all costs.
TRAFFIC EXCHANGES
I'm talking about the start page and surf for credits variety here. My
biggest beef with these programs is that they require you to do an awful lot
of surfing to get exposure for your site. It becomes time consuming.
My second biggest beef with them is that people who use them are basically
only interested in generating credits for their own sites to be shown, not
in looking at what you have to offer.
But if you can get around the time you have to spend surfing for credits,
these exchanges can be useful. Especially if you have a small budget for
marketing.
If you optimize the pages you want to show on the exchanges for this type of
medium, you will have a page that is quick to load, grabs interest, and does
not attempt to sell anything. The page you show should not be a generic
affiliate program page that surfers will see a thousand times a month and
become immune to. Rather, it should be a page that stands out, grabs
attention, and offers something of value for fr^e. The something of value,
of course, will be something that either generates a subscriber to your
opt-in list or a viral marketing product that you give away.
You could also make your surf for credits programs do double duty for you.
For example, you could join a service like Subscription Rocket at:
http://www.subscriptionrocket.com/cgi-bin/r.cgi?r=3213
You place a small amount of code on your web page that launches a popup. The
popup includes the name and description of ten or so ezines that people can
subscribe to. Every time you show the popup, your ezine or list will be
shown 4 times from other people's websites.
By showing the web page with this popup in your surf for credit exchanges,
you can generate a substantial number of exposures for your ezine or list
and pick up quite a few new subscribers.
SAFELISTS
Safelists are basically useless because everyone who belongs to the list
usually dumps the email messages they receive into a junk mail account and
never reads your message. But there are a few of the newer "credits based"
safelists that do seem to get results. The reason is that people get credits
to send their messages only by opening yours and clicking on a link
contained in the email. I never thought this would work, because you can
find the link without reading the message, but it does produce results when
used properly.
If you keep your message very short and enticing, it will get you some
results. Tease the reader to visit your site and, again, do not try to sell.
Give them something fr^e or offer a viral marketing product.
We tested this concept thoroughly and got good enough results from it to
keep on using it to give away a free ebook that is a viral marketing tool.
If you want to try this, I would recommend starting with the following two
lists:
Adtactics -
http://www.adtactics.com/index.php?ac=philcary
Safelister -
http://www.safelister.com/pg.cgi/philcary/index.html
You can join them fr^e and there are currently more than 30,000 members in
the two lists combined. Do not use your normal email address with the lists,
though, since you will receive a lot of mail from other members. If you do
not understand this concept, contact me by email before you join!
. . .AND ONE TO AVOID!
I never thought I'd give this new marketing technique a second thought. I
believed it would die a quick death, at least as it is in its present form.
It's called IP advertising and works off the Windows network messaging
service. It involves a software program that will send your ad to millions
of IP addresses and does not require using email.
Imagine, you're sitting at your computer reading an interesting article, and
all of a sudden, these little popups with ads start appearing like magic on
your screen. That's IP advertising.
I thought this would die out quickly because the links in the messages are
not even clickable. You have to manually type in the URL to visit the site
being advertised. No one is going to do that. In fact, in a recent test
carried out by a reputable marketer, the response was zero on several
million ads. That's why I thought I wouldn't have to give it a second
thought.
Then today I received an ad for a new M L M program that is built around
this technology. God save us all, here come the hordes! If you're using a
firewall, you can probably filter these ads out. If you're not, get ready
for the onslaught!
Please stay away from this technology. If you thought sp^m was a huge issue,
this one is going to create a war! People are going to get hurt over this
one. And I mean physically!
WHY EXPERIMENTATION CAN BE GOOD
I would be very content to tell you to never bother with any types of
marketing other than the "staples" I mentioned in the first paragraph above.
But experimenting with some of the free marketing resources that are
available can be a good way to learn more about marketing. Additionally, you
never know when someone is going to come up with something new that becomes
one of the "staples" itself.
You see that in both of the examples I used above, the traffic exchanges and
the credits-based safelists, I'm recommending you use them only to further
your other, more effective marketing efforts. This is the way you should use
any free resource. Very few, if any, can ever be used for direct selling.
Keep that in mind and spend a little time experimenting with using free
resources to supplement your "real" marketing efforts. You will find some
pleasant surprises if you get creative enough.
Copyright (c) 2003 |
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