May 31 03 SBC Small Business Newsletter

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Featured Article

Two Good Options for Launching a Low Cost Ad Campaign
by: Cary Christian

I'm not talking about email campaigns! If you're like me, you are probably going to be a bit leery of email marketing for the foreseeable future. It has simply become too dangerous and people are so overloaded with unsolicited advertisements in their email boxes, response rates are way down. We all could use a few good alternatives right about now.

I've written many times about using the pay-per-click engines to generate targeted traffic to your website. Most often I have recommended Overture, FindWhat and Kanoodle, and I stand by those recommendations. They are solid, effective advertising mediums. The downside is that they can become quite expensive to use for a consistent, concentrated, long-term campaign.

Willie Crawford posted a new site on the Warrior Forum, and others I believe, that offers a list of PPC engines that give away more than $3,000 worth in total of free PPC advertising just for signing up. I've always been wary of most of these deals, because usually the PPC engine would require you to make a deposit equal to the amount of free advertising dollars they would give you. If the engine turned out to be ineffective, you could sit there with an unrecoverable balance for who knows how long.

The engines on this list do not work that way. No deposit is required. All you do is sign up, list your site, pick your keywords and you're on your way.

Granted, these are not PPC engines of the quality of Overture and FindWhat, but they will produce targeted traffic. Targeted traffic is targeted traffic regardless of where it comes from, and since $3,000 could buy you 30,000 to 60,000 targeted visitors, I see no reason not to try it when it isn't costing you a dime. After you've run through your free credits, you can decide then which, if any, you would like to continue using.

The URL for the list is http://masterthepayperclicks.com/3000free/ You will need to sign up for the Pay-Per-Click Explained newsletter to gain access to the list, but I believe it is a worthwhile ezine to receive anyway.

The second option I want to talk to you about is not free, but it is low cost and represents a different type of search engine that might produce excellent results for you. It works like this:

You sign up for your account, provide information on your site or product, and select the keywords that represent your site. You do NOT bid on each keyword. Instead, you pay a set monthly fee for your listings.

The ranking of your listing will change with each search that is performed on your keywords. Sometimes you will be near the bottom of the search results, and other times you will be number 1. Each site that has selected a particular keyword will rotate to a different position with each search so that every site that bid on that keyword will have more or less equal representation in the searches.

The beauty of this system is that you can plan and manage a long-term campaign and you will know exactly what your monthly cost will be. "Ego" bidders will not be able to usurp your top positions by bidding astronomically high on the most popular keywords and inflating the cost of bidding to the point where ROI is out the window. This makes this marketing system much easier to manage in terms of cost and maintenance than PPC engines. You will pay less than you would using PPC engines and you will be creating a consistent online presence for your business.

I would recommend you try Towersearch at http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/towersearch.htm Their service works very well.

You can sign up for their standard account for $29.95 per month with no setup fees and choose up to 100 keywords for your site. If you need more keywords, you can have unlimited keywords for $49.95 per month, again with no setup fees. This program will provide you with targeted, PPC-quality visitors at a low FIXED cost per month.

$30 per month would not buy you much of a PPC campaign. With a service like Towersearch, you can get virtually unlimited hits at that rate.

And there you have it! Two excellent, low cost ways to drive more targeted traffic to your site. Let me know how they work for you.

Resources We Recommend

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