Here is a little guide that Johan, a very successful Affiliate, put together for those of you that are interested in free advertising.
Does it work?There are a few free strategies that you can use if you want to start your SFI business completely free. What I'm going to focus on is free classified ad posting. I do this mainly because it's "my method", and I have practiced it for a long time. I know this works because I have built my SFI business this way. No one can tell me that this is a waste of time. If they do that it depend on that they are not doing it right. Be prepared to spend some time, but if time is not an issue you can use free advertising to build your SFI business.
Before you start with free ads.Before posting free ads I STRONGLY recommend that you set up an extra business e-mail address. Free classifieds are free for a reason: When you post ads you will receive "confirmation e-mails" that your ads was posted. If you post to classified networks you can receive hundreds of confirmation e-mails per day. You can set up a free Hotmail or Yahoo account. Once a week I recommend that you clean up your e-mail account by deleting all e-mails so the inbox doesn't get full.
In many cases you must register and verify your e-mail address before you can post. In that case register your business e-mail address. Use the same password for all registrations so you easily can remember it.
Why you should post your ads on a Tuesday 12AM CST.Statistics are very important, For example you can use statistics to figure out when it's more likely that people should find your advertising. First let's take a look at some charts that display statistics that I've collected from my websites:
Here is a graphical chart that displays how internet traffic flow during the hours of the day:
This chart displays how traffic flow during the days of the week:
This chart displays how much traffic that comes from different time zones:
When you combine all these statistics you will find out that it's best to post an ad on a Tuesday 12AM CST, because it's then most people you target are active on the internet. You can also find out that it's a waste of time to post an ad 5AM on a Saturday. By taking advantage of these facts you can improve your results ten times or more.
Stay focused!Try to stay focused when you post ads. It's easy to get attracted by some advertising that says: "post 2000 ads here" or "this submit software posts to 500.000 sites with a click of a button" or something similar. You will find a lot of attractive offers on those sites because they know that you are a targeted customer! One good rule is: You will never find anyone advertising effective advertising. Logic: If the advertising is effective it will be used by the owner itself. Submission software is useless because they post to sites no real humans visit. All good classified ad sites have protection against this software. Posting manually or with the help of typing programs like AdWizard are the best methods (the only methods). But if you want to try a free service that posts to over three million sites go here: http://www.worldsubmitter.com or http://ld.net/bigsubmit/?kmckenzi And PLEASE follow my advice and use your business e-mail address this time.
How to place your
ads.Place ads in categories like: "Business Opportunities", "Work At Home", Home Business, MLM, and similar. Do not post ads in unrelated categories. If you have to option to post in several relating categories - do that.
In many cases there is a form where you can fill in your website URL. But sometimes you have to include it in the ad-description. ALWAYS include your site URL though.
When you start to post free classified ads you can do it without adding the sites to the AdWizard (if you have chosen to use this program), but as soon as your tracking shows that a site is giving you visitors you add this page to the AdWizard, or at least write down the URL in notepad. Your goal is to find as many classified ad sites that are bringing a positive result; those sites will be your goldmines! A site that gives you a visitor per day or at least every second day is a good site. Stop posting ads to sites that do not give you any visitors. Your goal is to find a handful of good classified ad sites that continuously give you visitors. The more ads you post to different sites and track the results, the more and better sites you will find. If you do this you can not fail because your results WILL be better every day. This process only goes in one direction, and it is towards better and better results, how fast depend on your effort.
How often should I place my ads?It depends if this is a high traffic site or not. Sometimes your ad can roll off the site in one hour or faster. Sometimes it stays for weeks. But generally you can post once every day, and that is what I recommend. But sometimes you might find a site where no one posts and it might look a little silly if it's only you that post the same ad there every day. So it could be good if you check out a site before you post there the second time.
Finding classified ad sites.You will find some sites in the DBoard Resource Center, but I also recommend that you search for more sites on the internet. The major mistake people do is that they search for classified ad sites when they search for classified ad sites (?). Let me explain: If you use the search engines and type in "classified ad sites" you will find a lot of ad sites. BUT is that what the people you are trying to reach do? No; they search for a phrase like "work at home, or "home based business" and similar. So if you place ads on classified ad sites you have found searching for "classified ad sites" your ads will be on pages your targeted visitors never find.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who's looking for a work at home opportunity. How would they go about searching for this on the net? Think of the phrases they might type in their favorite search engine search box. Now type one of those phrases in the search box of the major search engines and research the sites that shows up in the results. Then try those phrases with different search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Google, Lycos, etc.).
Go to EVERY site that comes up in the 1st 20 matches (anything lower than 20 IS NOT worth your time). Take notes or print out the 1st 20 results, especially the Yahoo and Google results (Google results also appear in Yahoo when a user clicks on "web pages", so advertising in one of these sites also gets you exposure on yahoo).
Finding classified ad sites this way is a little harder but worth the extra trouble.
Tracking your results.This is my favorite subject. It's because of effective tracking that I'm able to have a profitable business today. And at this point many marketers fails. You must have a personal website to track your advertising effectively. If you still have not requested one from me you can do that. By adding a piece of HTML code to the website you will be able to find out statistics from your visitors. The most important stats is how many visitor you have and from where they come. You will be able to find out the exact advertisement that attracted the person to come visiting your site. By placing advertising and tracking your results you will find out where you should continue to place ads, and where you should stop wasting your time!
If you compare this with off-line advertising - this is very hard to get statistics from - internet marketing is a playground for those of you that like to have control over what happens. Off-line scenario: I have opened a new bookstore in my town and want to tell everyone about it's existence. I place ads in different categories of papers and send out commercials to mailboxes all over town. People start to visit my bookstore and business is ok. I figure that my advertising campaign worked, but have no idea WHAT aspect of my campaign that worked. At this point I started to ask every visitor that came to my shop where they found out about it, NOT. But with internet marketing you can do this!
Place ads during the most active hours on the day, and by the end of the day you log in and make notes of what websites that gave you a positive result. If you repeat this every day you will soon have many websites that are sending you visitors. This is a process that will improve your results step by step, day by day.
So don't advertise without tracking your results; it's like working in the dark.
Resources.Classified ad sites in the DBoard Resource Center.
AdWizard - automate your ad posting.
SiteMeter - statistics and tracking