In this chapter we’ll discuss several ways to advertise on your sites – whether they are for your own products or for an affiliate program.  

Solo Ads  

A solo ad goes out to your list by itself – not accompanied by your usual newsletter. If you have gone to the trouble of creating a popular Web site where you have a loyal following of repeat visitors and ezine subscribers, you’ll want to be careful about what Solo ads you run. You’ll want to make sure that what you recommend to them is trustworthy and of value. People who blast their lists with everything that comes down the pike, will soon lose the respect of their readers. Once respect is lost, so goes the response rate and possibly even your subscribers.  

If you do find a product or service that you would like to promote using a solo advertisement, make sure that you keep these types of ads to a minimum and let your readers know that the occasional solo ad helps you keep your informative newsletter coming to them on a regular basis by defraying costs.  

Ezine Ads  

Inside your email newsletter you can also place smaller advertisements. A great place to find advertisers for your newsletter is http://www.EzineAdAuction.com . On this site you can place your ezine or solo ad availability, set a minimum price for it and allow people to bid on it. The highest bidder wins the ad spot. Another way to sell Ezine ads is to package them with other forms of advertising such as banner ads. For example, if someone purchases 50,000 banner ad impressions, you might throw in a free ezine ad in your newsletter.  

Context-Sensitive Text Ads  

Google has a program called AdSense where you can place a small snippet of code on your Web site and it picks up keywords from the page and runs an appropriate context-sensitive advertisement. You are then paid for each person who clicks through to the advertisements. You can even exclude competitors ads from showing up on your site. Some clicks yield higher pay than others. It just depends on what people bid on the clicks. Visit http://www.google.com and go to their advertising programs link.

You can also create your own context-sensitive text ads and run them on your Web site. If something looks like a tip or a link to an informational article, it will pull better than a flashing ad. We’ve been using these for years on IdeaMarketers with success.  

Banners and Buttons  

Banners and buttons don’t give the results they used to because most people have gotten used to them and won’t click on them anymore. The highest click-through rates we’ve seen on our network have been for banners that look like a pull-down form selection box. Ones that look like simple text also work well, given they have a catchy headline and text. Pretty banners with graphics and animation actually yield the lowest results, in my experience.  

If you decide to serve banner ads on your site, check into a program that will calculate the number of click-throughs and impressions and let you set a maximum number of impressions so that banners automatically stop running when the amount purchased is fulfilled. One such program is AdCycle. I like this one because I can give each advertiser a unique username and password to log in and view the results for their ads. You’ll need someone who knows something about programming to help you install it. You can visit www.elance.com to find a technical person.  

Affiliate Programs  

If you don’t have your own products or even if you do and you want to find supplemental income, you can locate affiliate programs that fit your target audience at www.ClickBank.com in their Marketplace.  

You can also ask other people in your same industry which affiliate programs work best for them. Some affiliate programs are multiple-tiered, meaning you earn not only on people you refer, but also on the people they refer. In this case, even your competitors would be more than happy to give you their affiliate link for affiliates that are working for them because they would directly benefit from your success with the program as well.

Continue on to Chapter 5: Marketing Strategies
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