by: Marc Goldman
OK, so we have all heard the clamors from people who have made money from placing ads in ezines. The process is simple enough. You have a product or service (or an affiliate program of which you are a member) and you also have a small classified ad promoting the benefits of said product or service. You pay to advertise in ezines that have a circulation comprised of the audience you wish to target.
This sounds easy enough but these days ezine advertising has become so competitive that a smart marketer needs to rethink his/her ezine advertising strategy. This is necessary in order to stand apart from the competition, reach an audience of targeted customers and continue to reap the overwhelming benefits resulting from this highly effective medium.
One of the biggest problems with traditional ezine advertising is the fact that your ad gets sandwiched in between 5-15 other ads of similar content. This naturally dramatically decreases the effectiveness of your ad.
Not to mention the fact that with so many affiliate programs in existence, competition between affiliates has escalated to new heights leading to many affiliates of the same program saturating a once responsive market through their ezine advertising campaigns.
This has lead to decreased revenues for the affiliates and public apathy for the product/service. The situation has gotten so competitive that not only once but on several occasions I have witnessed ezines publish the exact same ad for an affiliate program (with different affiliate I.D.'s) all in the very same issue. How can this possibly benefit those advertisers?
However, this is not the fault of the ezine publisher either. The main purpose of an ezine (for many but not all publishers) is to sell advertising. When someone approaches a publisher with advertising dollars, you cannot fault him/her for taking the money and running the ad. That publisher is simply making an honest buck.
But there are some ingenious methods you can employ to get your ad in front of a responsive target market by utilizing ezine advertising. For starters, if you run an affiliate program provide your affiliates with several different, tested classified ads which they can use to place in different ezines.
Remember, your affiliates are your salespeople - you want them to make as much money as possible so that you too make as much money as possible. Therefore, it is in your best interest to help them as much as you can.
If you are an affiliate, try your hand at writing some killer classified ads of your own so as to stand out from the competition. If you are not a great writer, I highly recommend picking up Robert Boduch's Great Headlines Instantly and putting the ideas within to use immediately.
Next, I strongly recommend that you shell out a little more money for a sponsor ad or a solo mailing in a newsletter that offers these services. A sponsor ad is the ad at the very top or very bottom of an ezine. Since they are closer to the top or bottom they stand apart from the other ads and so they illicit a much greater, more favorable response from subscribers.
A solo mailing is a 3-7 paragraph ad which an ezine sends to its list separate from its regular newsletter mailing. The size of these ads vary from one newsletter to another but they have proven, by far, to be the most effective, most profitable ezine ad in which an advertiser could ever invest his/her money.
These two advertising methods are the most powerful tools in an ezine advertisers arsenal. There is only one problem, how do you find out which ezines offer these advertising opportunities? Well, first you will need to find a comprehensive list of ezines and then spend some time combing through the thousands of zines to find those that meet your demographic requirements.
When that is done you are ready to further narrow the list by sifting through to find the ones that accept ads (free and paid). Finally, you need to find those that specifically offer solo and sponsorship ad opportunities and do some price shopping. Naturally, you need quite a bit of free time to complete this process. But do not despair, you do have an intelligent alternative if time is an issue for you.
The Ultimate Media Magnet has compiled all of the newsletters that offer sponsor ads and solo mailings into one efficient directory. All the ezines are sorted by category so as to make it even easier for you to immediately pull out those targeted to your market.
The Ultimate Media Magnet is by far the best solution for any marketer selling any product or service. You will instantly find targeted ezines that offer the most effective methods of reaching a hungry, paying audience.
The Ultimate Media Magnet is only one tool available to members of The Ultimate Marketers Resource (http://success.goldbar.net).
Ezine advertising has been and will continue to be one of the most cost effective and profit generating tools at the internet marketers disposal. But, like everything else on the internet, for advertising methods to remain effective they must evolve.
Think of it this way, many marketing gurus and internet millionaires of today made their fortune from unsolicited email (SPAM). However, currently this method is considered unethical and these very same marketers now utilize opt-in email, ezine marketing and autoresponders instead.
To succeed using ezine advertising, you must change with the times and use the methods that work today!
Marc Goldman - Since 1999, The Ultimate Marketers Resource has been the only system enabling you to manage EVERY aspect of your business from Autoresponder services, Mailing List services and management, Lead Generation, and Ad Tracking, to Viral Marketing and much, much more remotely from anywhere in the world, anytime, from any computer for a low monthly fee. Click here to learn more before your competitors do: http://success.goldbar.net
This sounds easy enough but these days ezine advertising has become so competitive that a smart marketer needs to rethink his/her ezine advertising strategy. This is necessary in order to stand apart from the competition, reach an audience of targeted customers and continue to reap the overwhelming benefits resulting from this highly effective medium.
6/19/08
MSN PPC Advertising Network Finally Debuts
by: Joel Walsh
MSN PPC Advertising Network Finally Debuts MSN is launching its own PPC advertising program with new demographic and behavioral targeting features in France and Singapore in mid-late 2005. 2005-03-17 Joel Walsh MSN PPC Advertising Long-Awaited Debut AnnouncedYou probably already know that there are really only two major players in the world of PPC advertising: Overture and Google Adwords. By the end of 2005, there will likely be a third: Microsoft's MSN Search.Microsoft recently announced that it is launching its new MSN PPC advertising engine in Singapore and France by mid-late 2005. Smart marketers are probably already planning how they might justify advertising their products or services in Singapore to get a taste of the new service. The service's introduction into Canada, the UK, and the US may very well come before the end of 2005.The new MSN advertising program has been long awaited. MSN is Microsoft's leading website property, and perhaps the web's most visited "portal" (website with both search and content such as news) after Yahoo! MSN's search engine accounts for one in five web searches, putting it in third place behind Google and Yahoo!Search engine advertising mostly a two-player gameCurrently, MSN shows advertising that comes from Overture, the web's largest online advertising network in terms of revenue. Overture was bought by Yahoo! a number of years ago. Since Yahoo! is the direct competitor of MSN in every way, plenty of people have been wondering why MSN didn't take its advertising program in-house long ago. It seems especially strange considering that even Lycos, whose search engine now accounts for a small fraction of total web searches, has its own advertising network.In many minds, the fact that Microsoft would go to Overture only demonstrated how excellent an online advertising program Overture was, and just how hard it really is to set one up. Before going to Overture, MSN was getting advertising from LookSmart, an advertising network that does not own any websites that compete with Microsoft properties in any big way. Even before it had lost its largest advertising outlet, LookSmart was widely seen as a subpar second-tier engine, in a category with FindWhat or even Kanoodle. The fact that LookSmart had seemingly squandered a chance to make inroads into an online advertising market dominated by two big players cast a lot of doubt on whether there would ever be a serious challenger to Google Adwords and Overture.What Microsoft's new advertising network means for the futureWill the new MSN advertising network succeed where so many have failed? Or will it become a bloated, relatively uncompetitive product only supported by Microsoft's vast bulk? (Not that Bill Gates has ever fathered such a bastard child.)There's a very good reason to believe that the new advertising program bears the seeds of its own destruction, thanks to a typically Microsoftian act of overreaching and obliviousness to public opinion. That bad seed is the same bad seed that has spoiled the fruits of so many internet marketing labors: behavioral and demographic targeting, which always seems to disagree with some people's stomachs, no matter how delicately it is arranged in the bowl. (Editor's note: too extended a metaphor? Well, website copywriters have egos, too, you know, just like the rest of the web dev. community. At least you didn't have to sit through five minutes of flash animation to read this.)Next: MSN PPC Advertising to Incorporate Demographic & Behavioral Targeting: Killer App. or Achilles Heel?Microsoft's press release announcing the new MSN advertising program is also worth reading if you're that into this.Joel Walsh is the head writer at UpMarket, internet marketing services, online copywriting services, & website content provider focusing on small and medium-sized businesses and those who serve them. Website: www.upmarketcontent.com
MSN PPC Advertising Network Finally Debuts MSN is launching its own PPC advertising program with new demographic and behavioral targeting features in France and Singapore in mid-late 2005. 2005-03-17 Joel Walsh MSN PPC Advertising Long-Awaited Debut AnnouncedYou probably already know that there are really only two major players in the world of PPC advertising: Overture and Google Adwords. By the end of 2005, there will likely be a third: Microsoft's MSN Search.Microsoft recently announced that it is launching its new MSN PPC advertising engine in Singapore and France by mid-late 2005. Smart marketers are probably already planning how they might justify advertising their products or services in Singapore to get a taste of the new service. The service's introduction into Canada, the UK, and the US may very well come before the end of 2005.The new MSN advertising program has been long awaited. MSN is Microsoft's leading website property, and perhaps the web's most visited "portal" (website with both search and content such as news) after Yahoo! MSN's search engine accounts for one in five web searches, putting it in third place behind Google and Yahoo!Search engine advertising mostly a two-player gameCurrently, MSN shows advertising that comes from Overture, the web's largest online advertising network in terms of revenue. Overture was bought by Yahoo! a number of years ago. Since Yahoo! is the direct competitor of MSN in every way, plenty of people have been wondering why MSN didn't take its advertising program in-house long ago. It seems especially strange considering that even Lycos, whose search engine now accounts for a small fraction of total web searches, has its own advertising network.In many minds, the fact that Microsoft would go to Overture only demonstrated how excellent an online advertising program Overture was, and just how hard it really is to set one up. Before going to Overture, MSN was getting advertising from LookSmart, an advertising network that does not own any websites that compete with Microsoft properties in any big way. Even before it had lost its largest advertising outlet, LookSmart was widely seen as a subpar second-tier engine, in a category with FindWhat or even Kanoodle. The fact that LookSmart had seemingly squandered a chance to make inroads into an online advertising market dominated by two big players cast a lot of doubt on whether there would ever be a serious challenger to Google Adwords and Overture.What Microsoft's new advertising network means for the futureWill the new MSN advertising network succeed where so many have failed? Or will it become a bloated, relatively uncompetitive product only supported by Microsoft's vast bulk? (Not that Bill Gates has ever fathered such a bastard child.)There's a very good reason to believe that the new advertising program bears the seeds of its own destruction, thanks to a typically Microsoftian act of overreaching and obliviousness to public opinion. That bad seed is the same bad seed that has spoiled the fruits of so many internet marketing labors: behavioral and demographic targeting, which always seems to disagree with some people's stomachs, no matter how delicately it is arranged in the bowl. (Editor's note: too extended a metaphor? Well, website copywriters have egos, too, you know, just like the rest of the web dev. community. At least you didn't have to sit through five minutes of flash animation to read this.)Next: MSN PPC Advertising to Incorporate Demographic & Behavioral Targeting: Killer App. or Achilles Heel?Microsoft's press release announcing the new MSN advertising program is also worth reading if you're that into this.Joel Walsh is the head writer at UpMarket, internet marketing services, online copywriting services, & website content provider focusing on small and medium-sized businesses and those who serve them. Website: www.upmarketcontent.com
Advertising Made Easy
by: chet holmes
How You Can Make Advertising Pay Big Dividends (source: www.chetholmes.com)
McGraw Hill once commissioned an extensive study to determine what marketing weapons make a company famous in it’s market or community.
The study went on to show that advertising created more product, service, or brand awareness than all other marketing weapons combined.
The fact is, we know that Coke is “The Real Thing” because Coke advertises, not because it has good salespeople or does great direct mail.
Advertising stays in front of your prospects when you can’t be there. While a handful of salespeople can only be in front of perhaps a hundred or so prospects per month, advertising can reach thousands of potential buyers each and every month, week, or day.
Studies also show that advertising inspires confidence from your current clients. When current clients see your ad, it reinforces their belief in you.
It makes them feel like they made the right decision to be your client. But advertising can also waste money if you don’t use it properly.
To avoid wasting money, keep these three tips in mind. Don’t spend money on an advertising vehicle if the majority of its listeners/viewer/readers will never buy your type of product or services.
For example, let’s say that you own a commercial real estate company or a business bank. In both cases, you are only interested in business people.
Broad-reaching television or radio stations or general-interest daily newspapers base their rates on how many consumers they reach.
An examination of their audiences may easily show you that a high percentage of their listeners or readers are not business people, yet you will have to pay to reach all of them.
Conversely, there are more specialized advertising vehicles that target a far greater percentage of your potential buyers.
A business radio program or a business publication will offer you an audience comprised mostly of your potential buyers.
If you do advertise, do not expect that a single ad, or even a few ads, constitute effective advertising. Effective advertising needs to be consistent and steady.
However: If you don’t have the budget to take a full advertising schedule, I often recommend that my clients buy one, well placed ad in the ideal magazine and then use that piece for years sometimes with a banner that says: “As Seen In Industry Today.”
This ad then works very hard for you as a direct mail piece, promo piece, or even a hand out at a trade show.
Don’t spread your advertising too thin. Some years ago, a corporate training company launched its services by buying a few spots per week on seven different radio stations.
Since it was not on any one station long enough to give its message a chance to take root, the advertising was a total failure.
The company should have taken its entire budget and sunk it into one or (at the most) two primary vehicles. Each advertising vehicle has a loyal audience.
You are far better off having a heavy schedule in one vehicle, where you have a chance to break through the clutter and get noticed, than to take a few spots in a half-dozen vehicles in which you get lost in the commercial clutter.
Today, repetition and concentration are the keys to successful advertising.
Another important point along the lines of advertising smart is that cable TV today can virtually change your life in a week. I know a fellow who has an electronic repair business.
He would fix VCR’s, TV’s, Toasters, etc… and he also would come to your home to hook up your entire entertainment system if you needed him to do that. The name of the business was Mr. Tim’s Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service.
First, on my advice, he took an insert in the newspaper. (An “insert” is a flyer that is printed separately and “inserted” into the newspaper as a loose piece of paper).
This is generally a very good way to go with B2B in a trade journal or B2C in a newspaper.
These are good because they fall out of the magazine or newspaper onto your desk or kitchen table and they are less expensive to buy than printing your ad right in the vehicle of choice.
When I ran magazines and newspapers, we discouraged them because we NEEDED ads in the magazine/newspaper, but when we had a client we were going to lose over lack of response, we ALWAYS recommended the insert because they almost always worked.
So Mr. Tim’s Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service took the newspaper insert in the local newspaper and bought, specifically, the major neighborhoods where he felt they have more time than money.
That’s the other beauty of newspaper inserts is that you can generally buy a small piece of the circulation to test the idea or to concentrate geographically. This worked for months for Mr. Tim, as people kept the insert around until they needed him.
But one of the people that spotted that insert was the local cable salesperson who told him he could make him famous. Mr. Tim thought TV would be WAY too expensive, but, as it turns out, in some markets, you can buy just a neighborhood. You can buy by zip code.
So for $200 per week, Mr. Tim was on TV like 60 times per week, spread all over 50 different cable channels.
It was amazing. You’d be watching re-runs of Seinfeld and there would come this Mr. Tim’s Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service ad and his phone would ring. It worked great.
Then one day he walks into a bike shop and someone recognized him from his TV ad. He was becoming famous from this mere $200 per week.
Not for everyone, but if you sell B2C, look into local cable and concentrate with a lot of spots.
Every business action requires some kind of cost justification. Does the effort justify the cost? Company X advertised its professional educational materials.
When it seemed as though the advertising was not working, the company was going to cancel its ad campaign.
Then it discovered a startling correlation between its advertising and its direct-mail efforts: Its direct-mail response went up by 30% in the months it advertised to the same audience.
This is typical. The more penetration you can get to the same audience, the better the possibility that you will get noticed.
In the ’90s, getting noticed is everything. In today’s commercial clutter, you get noticed only by continually reaching the same potential customer with a consistent theme, message, look, and feel.
If you advertise in a print medium (magazine, newspaper, etc.), you will find that most publications will rent you their mailing lists.
This means you can direct mail to the same audience to which you are advertising! This is a very smart usage of marketing dollars.
Look at the lifetime value. If you have an inexpensive product, your advertising has to deliver a high number of leads, or every lead has to turn into a repeat customer.
For example, say your average customer spends $25 with you. If you are spending $1,000 per month on advertising, you will need to attract 40 new customers per month to break even on the ad, not counting any of your other costs, such as product costs and overhead.
If those customers are one-time buyers, then you have to find a way to make your advertising more effective or less expensive. If they become regular buyers, then you can accept lower response rates.
The key here is to look at the “lifetime value” of a customer. A customer who spends $25 a month and comes to your store only once is only worth $25 to you.
But if you can get that customer to be a repeat customer, then that customer is worth $300 a year, or $1,500 over five years!
Most business people do not understand the power of advertising; they do not realize that each new $25 customer is potentially a $1,500 customer!
Advertising brings in the customers, but it is your job to keep them buying from you.
Advertising promotes word-of-mouth
Often, a loyal customer will see your ad while with a friend or business associate. Your customer will show your ad to the friend and say, “Hey Joe, now this is a really great company/product/service.”
Joe will come into your business, and you will ask him how he heard of you. He will say that his friend referred him and never think to mention that it was your advertising that prompted the friend to open his mouth in the first place.
How You Can Make Advertising Pay Big Dividends (source: www.chetholmes.com)
McGraw Hill once commissioned an extensive study to determine what marketing weapons make a company famous in it’s market or community.
The study went on to show that advertising created more product, service, or brand awareness than all other marketing weapons combined.
The fact is, we know that Coke is “The Real Thing” because Coke advertises, not because it has good salespeople or does great direct mail.
Advertising stays in front of your prospects when you can’t be there. While a handful of salespeople can only be in front of perhaps a hundred or so prospects per month, advertising can reach thousands of potential buyers each and every month, week, or day.
Studies also show that advertising inspires confidence from your current clients. When current clients see your ad, it reinforces their belief in you.
It makes them feel like they made the right decision to be your client. But advertising can also waste money if you don’t use it properly.
To avoid wasting money, keep these three tips in mind. Don’t spend money on an advertising vehicle if the majority of its listeners/viewer/readers will never buy your type of product or services.
For example, let’s say that you own a commercial real estate company or a business bank. In both cases, you are only interested in business people.
Broad-reaching television or radio stations or general-interest daily newspapers base their rates on how many consumers they reach.
An examination of their audiences may easily show you that a high percentage of their listeners or readers are not business people, yet you will have to pay to reach all of them.
Conversely, there are more specialized advertising vehicles that target a far greater percentage of your potential buyers.
A business radio program or a business publication will offer you an audience comprised mostly of your potential buyers.
If you do advertise, do not expect that a single ad, or even a few ads, constitute effective advertising. Effective advertising needs to be consistent and steady.
However: If you don’t have the budget to take a full advertising schedule, I often recommend that my clients buy one, well placed ad in the ideal magazine and then use that piece for years sometimes with a banner that says: “As Seen In Industry Today.”
This ad then works very hard for you as a direct mail piece, promo piece, or even a hand out at a trade show.
Don’t spread your advertising too thin. Some years ago, a corporate training company launched its services by buying a few spots per week on seven different radio stations.
Since it was not on any one station long enough to give its message a chance to take root, the advertising was a total failure.
The company should have taken its entire budget and sunk it into one or (at the most) two primary vehicles. Each advertising vehicle has a loyal audience.
You are far better off having a heavy schedule in one vehicle, where you have a chance to break through the clutter and get noticed, than to take a few spots in a half-dozen vehicles in which you get lost in the commercial clutter.
Today, repetition and concentration are the keys to successful advertising.
Another important point along the lines of advertising smart is that cable TV today can virtually change your life in a week. I know a fellow who has an electronic repair business.
He would fix VCR’s, TV’s, Toasters, etc… and he also would come to your home to hook up your entire entertainment system if you needed him to do that. The name of the business was Mr. Tim’s Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service.
First, on my advice, he took an insert in the newspaper. (An “insert” is a flyer that is printed separately and “inserted” into the newspaper as a loose piece of paper).
This is generally a very good way to go with B2B in a trade journal or B2C in a newspaper.
These are good because they fall out of the magazine or newspaper onto your desk or kitchen table and they are less expensive to buy than printing your ad right in the vehicle of choice.
When I ran magazines and newspapers, we discouraged them because we NEEDED ads in the magazine/newspaper, but when we had a client we were going to lose over lack of response, we ALWAYS recommended the insert because they almost always worked.
So Mr. Tim’s Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service took the newspaper insert in the local newspaper and bought, specifically, the major neighborhoods where he felt they have more time than money.
That’s the other beauty of newspaper inserts is that you can generally buy a small piece of the circulation to test the idea or to concentrate geographically. This worked for months for Mr. Tim, as people kept the insert around until they needed him.
But one of the people that spotted that insert was the local cable salesperson who told him he could make him famous. Mr. Tim thought TV would be WAY too expensive, but, as it turns out, in some markets, you can buy just a neighborhood. You can buy by zip code.
So for $200 per week, Mr. Tim was on TV like 60 times per week, spread all over 50 different cable channels.
It was amazing. You’d be watching re-runs of Seinfeld and there would come this Mr. Tim’s Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service ad and his phone would ring. It worked great.
Then one day he walks into a bike shop and someone recognized him from his TV ad. He was becoming famous from this mere $200 per week.
Not for everyone, but if you sell B2C, look into local cable and concentrate with a lot of spots.
Every business action requires some kind of cost justification. Does the effort justify the cost? Company X advertised its professional educational materials.
When it seemed as though the advertising was not working, the company was going to cancel its ad campaign.
Then it discovered a startling correlation between its advertising and its direct-mail efforts: Its direct-mail response went up by 30% in the months it advertised to the same audience.
This is typical. The more penetration you can get to the same audience, the better the possibility that you will get noticed.
In the ’90s, getting noticed is everything. In today’s commercial clutter, you get noticed only by continually reaching the same potential customer with a consistent theme, message, look, and feel.
If you advertise in a print medium (magazine, newspaper, etc.), you will find that most publications will rent you their mailing lists.
This means you can direct mail to the same audience to which you are advertising! This is a very smart usage of marketing dollars.
Look at the lifetime value. If you have an inexpensive product, your advertising has to deliver a high number of leads, or every lead has to turn into a repeat customer.
For example, say your average customer spends $25 with you. If you are spending $1,000 per month on advertising, you will need to attract 40 new customers per month to break even on the ad, not counting any of your other costs, such as product costs and overhead.
If those customers are one-time buyers, then you have to find a way to make your advertising more effective or less expensive. If they become regular buyers, then you can accept lower response rates.
The key here is to look at the “lifetime value” of a customer. A customer who spends $25 a month and comes to your store only once is only worth $25 to you.
But if you can get that customer to be a repeat customer, then that customer is worth $300 a year, or $1,500 over five years!
Most business people do not understand the power of advertising; they do not realize that each new $25 customer is potentially a $1,500 customer!
Advertising brings in the customers, but it is your job to keep them buying from you.
Advertising promotes word-of-mouth
Often, a loyal customer will see your ad while with a friend or business associate. Your customer will show your ad to the friend and say, “Hey Joe, now this is a really great company/product/service.”
Joe will come into your business, and you will ask him how he heard of you. He will say that his friend referred him and never think to mention that it was your advertising that prompted the friend to open his mouth in the first place.
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