There are so many people who are looking for FREE advertising, and that's okay. Free advertising should only be a means to generate additional income to allow you to start using more targeted advertising methods which you must pay for. My favorite form of paid advertising is Newsletter Advertising or Ezine Advertising.
Ezine's are topic specific email newsletters that are sent to only the people who ask for it. The frequency of the newsletter depends on the publisher; some are daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Most ezines are delivered by mail, but there are some that are delivered through the use of blogs. The major benefit to using ezine ads is that this form of advertising is the most targeted form of advertising as well as the most profitable. The reason is because people who want to know about golf and golf products subscribe to that topic related newsletter ON PURPOSE. Their intent is to stay abreast of new products, how to become better articles and overall an interest in golf. If you have a product or service related to golf, to place an ad in a newsletter read by golf lovers is the best move you can make.
There are three types of ads you can use: solo ads, sponsor ads and classified ads.
1. Classified ads are the cheapest and the smallest. They are 3-5 lines, run in blocks and receive the least clicks.
2. Sponsor ads are one step up from classifieds. They are placed at the top of the page (like how a banner is), are 10-15 lines, cost a little more than the classifieds and certainly get more clicks.
3. Now, solo ads are the holy grail of ezine marketing. A solo ad goes out alone. That means that the whole email on your ad is on a page by itself. It is the most expensive ad group, but the click through rate can be huge. I mean, this is an ad all about your product/service that goes out to people specifically interested in learning more about that product, service or industry.
Now I offer a small little tip that could save you thousands. A rule of thumb is to not pay more than $4/1000 subscribers on a newsletter list. For example, let's say you pick a newsletter you would like to advertise in. That newsletter has 75,000 subscribers and it would cost you $50 to run the ad. If you do the math, you would be paying about $.67/subscriber. That is awesome compared to what you would pay for an offline magazine ad right?! Now let's assume that 10%, or 7500 of that TARGETED group decided to look more at your offer. If 10% of those people wanted to even look deeper, that's 750 prospects that are now leads in your system to follow up with.
Wow! Lastly, let's go ahead and say that another 10% or 75 people make the decision to buy from you. If you made $20 for each sale, that would be $1500 in sales to you! That is a $1,450 profit from a little $50 ad. In my book, that is going from zero to hero!
If you value your time, you have to do targeted advertising. And since newsletters provide the best form of targeted advertising, it is also the basis of online success.
