No matter what I happen to be focusing on with my online marketing – whether for my own business or for what I might be teaching – I always find that I circle back to traffic generation sooner rather then later. It’s the fuel that powers this complex, wonderful machine that we’re all trying to build. It doesn’t matter how fancy, detailed or impressive this machine is that we’ve built. If it doesn’t have fuel, it’s worthless.
Similarly, if we spend all this time learning to write compelling copy – EPIC copy – set up an auto responder series, write awesome follow up emails with front end and back end offers scattered throughout, set up a blog filled with great information, forums, tutorials, video series, and linked to a Facebook fan page, etc… if we spend ALL THAT TIME learning and building, but we don’t know how to get TARGETED traffic to any of it – who are we helping here?
So now matter what new tool I learn or who I teach, after it’s said and done the question always is ‘now how should I get traffic to this?‘
When starting out with a new campaign, one of my favorite (and quickest) methods of driving traffic is Banner Ads. Placing banner advertisements on proven web sites that are already in front of your desired audience.
Let’s go through a basic step-by-step on how to select where we’re going to place our first banner...
…but first, it goes without saying that you MUST have thoroughly researched and profiled who your audience is and what they want. This could take several hours in the beginning but DO NOT cut corners here. You’ll end up wasting much, much more time then that later on having to redo things, not to mention wasting money advertising on sites whose audience won’t respond to your ad.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get to it!
- Go to Google and pull up their keyword tool
- type in your root keyword (weight loss, internet marketing, etc)
- click search and you’ll see that it pulls up a list of keywords
- copy and paste the top 25-50 relevant keywords into a text document (relevant, high traffic search terms)(Note: you need to use common sense here– you want relevant traffic, not garbage. If you’re looking for people who want to learn internet marketing, ‘how to start an internet business’ is relevant but ‘internet businesses for sale’ is not).
- After you have your list of 25-50 keywords, you’re going to go to Google.com and do a search for these keywords one by one.
- For each keyword search, copy the URL for the top 3 results (I like to keep a text document open so I can just copy and paste the URL into it real quick).
What you’re doing here is looking for the top sites that are already ranked for that keyword (they’ve done the work and they’re positioned) and find out who is selling advertising. After going through 25-50 keywords, you should have a decent amount of sites to start browsing through.
At this point we’ll want to:
- Start going through the sites, double checking that the content matches our audience (it should if we’ve done our research)
- Find out who is selling advertising (look for an ‘Advertise‘ link in the header or footer)
- Contact the sites that fit into our budget and buy a banner ad – traffic is immediate.
(I’ve included a link at the end for a spreadsheet I use to keep this all in order)
Now that’s a basic 1-2-3, you’ll want to analyze each option. You’re going to find that most sites offer you a decent bit of information on their advertising options.
There will usually be different options – different spots on the page, different sizes, text ads. All are good options, all are different prices. Start with what makes sense with your budget and test.
Click and download this spreadsheet to keep your research organized – do it now so you can follow along with our final bit of info.
Www.recruitingformlm.com/Banner-Ad-Tracking.ods
(Populate this list and compare before purchasing)
You’ll see a column for date, URL, monthly cost, # of visitors <=== all that information you should be able to get straight from the website. Each site will usually give you their statistics on their monthly traffic. If not, an email should get a quick response.
From there you’ll want to estimate your monthly traffic and your Cost Per Click (CPC). The spreadsheet includes those columns with formulas, so when you fill in the Price and Visitors columns, the other columns will populate. You’re Welcome 🙂
I like to get an estimate on what traffic I can expect on the high end and low end – 1.5% click thru rate on the high and 0.5% on the low. As you compile a list of sites and their prices, you’ll see the CTR and CPC vary, and you’ll also start to see which ones are good deals and GREAT deals! For those of you starting out or on a tight budget, it should be no problem to find banner ad space for under $100/month on a site with at least100,000 monthly visitors. Just keep looking!
While this is time consuming, once you’ve found a good match you’ll see that the traffic is immediate. As you make money from that banner, the next month you take your profits and 1. continue that banner and 2. buy a banner spot and your second choice from your research. Rinse and repeat.
*****
Some Final Tips:
1. You can tell if a keyword is profitable if:
- ads (ppc) show up on google
- the site has banner advertising already placed
- the site has a clear ‘advertise’ link or similar on top of page or footer
2. If you see a banner spot you want sold out, contact the site owner and ask them to contact you when the spot is available, let them know you’ll pay right away when it’s open.
3. As always: test, test, TEST!
To your success,
Adel Refai
Adel (‘Oddle’) is a longtime internet marketer and online marketing coach. Far from perfect, he has spent many years (and many dollars) learning just about every mistake there is to know when it comes to online marketing… all just so you, dear reader, won’t have to suffer through that same agony.
He now works online full time, doing things the right way. You can visit his newest blog – www.RecruitingForMLM.com – for more helpful information, to contact him or to add his Facebook page and follow him there!
