Ezine advertising is one of the many forms of online advertising. An ezine is an online magazine and there are several ways that you can place ads that will be read by the ezines subscribers and visitors to the site. How successful your ads will be depends on the ezines you choose, the products and/or services that you market, the advertisement itself and last, but definitely not least, the ezine advertising service that you choose to work with. It’s important that you do a little research before just jumping into any ezine. Here are some tips that you can follow.

First of all, come up with a list (as long as possible) with all of the ezines that are related to your niche. Make sure you note how big each subscriber list is, how often each newsletter is sent out and the prices charged for ads. The site Directory of Ezines will take most of the work out of this for you, you can search by size price or type of ad. After you’ve compiled your list, cross out (lightly) the ezines that are charging more than you can afford.

You should not take these off of your list because you may be able to afford them later on down the line. Check out the reputation of the ezines that are still left on your list. If you find that some of them come up in scam reviews, or get a lot of negative testimonials, cross them out for good. When you have your skimmed down list, you’ll want to subscribe to each of the ezine advertising services that you’ve chosen.

Once you start getting their communication, you can compare them and understand which ones are worth advertising with and which ones you can forget, at least for now. To decide whether an ezine is a good pick, check to make sure its web page is not on a free platform like Blogger or Wordpress.com or Yahoo hosting. Make sure that they clearly state what they offer in terms of advertising.

As far as the emails you will be getting from each ezine, first make sure that you must opt-in two times in order to receive the newsletter. This ensures that the subscriber base is responsive. Also, check to see that the publisher informs you of the types of email addresses that they can accept. Many email providers block spam.

If the ezine won’t allow you to use some of these, this is a good thing. It means that emails will be delivered to recipients rather than to the junk box. If you are receiving one or more email per day from the ezine, you don’t want to advertise with them. That’s too much competition. And you only want to go with the ones that have “real” subject lines provided by the advertiser and not by the publisher. You want to be able to create your own subject line for your ads. Check out the content of the newsletters you are receiving. If it is valuable content and not just ads, then it’s worth going for.

You may have more than one ezine advertising service that has passed your “test”. At this point, just go with the least expensive one.

A successful internet advertising campaign is coveted by most businesses, whether they are primarily online or offline. Even offline businesses need to take advantage of the best means of getting customer traffic. And their potential customers are online. Setting up an effective online advertising campaign can not be handled with a cookie-cutter approach. All businesses, products and services are different and consumer demographics and attitudes also vary from one product to the next. There are some general guidelines that you can follow to set up a solid framework for your campaign.

First, identify your target market if you haven’t already done so. It’s surprising the number of people who start businesses without realizing who their customers are, or many long-term business owners who haven’t kept up with the shifts in customer trends. In order to eventually reach your ideal internet advertising campaign, you need to understand your customers/potential customers very well. What are they looking for. What concerns them? Write down a list of questions that you could ask your target audience and find the answers. This will help you to reach them with your promotional efforts.

If you are on a low budget, you can start with free advertising at any of the social networking sites like FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. The key here is to be social. Include all of your business information and websites in your profile but you shouldn’t go out blasting your network with promotional messages or comments.

You can also start a free blog at Blogger.com which provides information about the products and services you offer.  Still staying in the low cost and blogging sphere, you can create your own blog to represent your business at a low cost and improve your business appearance over the free blogging platforms.  Sites like Blogging Beginners will show you how.

Or you can try article marketing which means creating informational articles about your business and submitting them to the article directories. YouTube is another fantastic way to do free (social) promotion. Upload a video or tutorial that is helpful to the people you are trying to target. More and more people are jumping on the YouTube bandwagon. It’s not the only video sharing site, but it is the most popular. Other forms of no-cost promotion include participation in your industry’s forums and/ or placing free online classified ads. Free advertising can be very effective, but it does take time to start seeing results. The goal is to provide real value to your audience and to be persistent and consistent in your efforts.

In terms of paid advertising, you can choose to run some PPC (pay per click) ads on your favorite search engine, paid online classifieds and banner ads on other websites that are relevant to your business. Ezine advertising is another effective method. Again, here it’s important that you do some research. Choose an ezine which suits your target marketing. Of course, you want to go with the ones that have more subscribers but the responsiveness of the subscribers is also very important. Get as much information as you can from the ezine publisher before committing to an advertisement.

Your internet advertising campaign should never be stagnant. It changes and adapts as you learn and your business grows.

Have you been trying to break into the online world of business and need internet advertising help? You’re not alone. Although many small businesses realize the importance of the internet, they often do not take advantage of what Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines have to offer. And many people don’t even know what Google Maps is all about – but this is essential if you own a brick and mortar business. Similar services exist in Bing and Yahoo too.

These are just some of the many internet advertising places. There are many other venues that you can use to promote your business, products and services:

1. Article Directories, Article Marketing and Content Sites. Registering with Ezine Articles (and the hundreds of other article directories), Hub Pages and Squidoo is completely free. Your goal with these sites is to create informative articles about your products/services and publish them here. Doing this will earn you credibility, expert status and possibly higher ranking in the search engines once you start bringing in traffic to your site.
2. Search Engine Pay Per Click (PPC) Platforms: All of the major search engines and many other search engines offer the possibility for you to advertise on their sites and some of the most sophisticated internet advertising help. It works like this. . .you place an ad based on some keywords that are relevant to your business, products or services. All of the search engines give you free tools that you can use to find the keywords that you want to target. You will bid on each keyword that you advertise and the search engines will also help you to identify what your bid should be. Once you have placed your ad, whenever anyone types in the keyword that you targeted into that search engine, your ad will come up. Where it appears depends on how high you placed your bid and how relevant your ad is to the keywords that you specified.
3. Ezine Advertising. Advertising in online magazines, called ezines, is another very effective way to get started with internet advertising. As with all of your advertising efforts, this requires some research on your part. Your goal is to find an ezine which fits your target market and advertising budget. Don’t discount ezines with small subscriber count. They may allow you to advertise for very little and often have very responsive lists.
4. Banner advertising. Placing banner advertisement on high traffic sites within your industry is also an effective way to bring in traffic to your own site.
5. Online Classified Ads. Many online classified sites allow you to place free advertisements within restrictions. Upgrading to become a paid member usually allows you to place more sophisticated ads more frequently than if you are a paid member.

Each of these methods offers internet advertising help in the form of written instructions, tutorials and support communities within their sites.

Many new internet marketers find themselves asking the question “How much does internet advertising cost?”. And the answer ranges from. . .”It’s free” to “It’s very expensive” depending on what type of advertising you are using. It’s important to remember that free advertising doesn’t necessarily mean low-quality, especially when it comes to internet advertising, but it does mean that you will pay in the amount of time that it takes rather than with a sum of money.

Free or low internet advertising cost methods include article marketing, blogging (on a free blogging platform), participating in any of the social networking sites or forums, placing free online classified advertising, using safe lists or traffic exchanges and more. Article marketing means creating informational articles that your target audience would be interested in reading and acting upon and submitting them to various content sites like EzineArticles, HubPages, Squidoo, etc. This type of advertising builds up your credibility, expert status and can get you ranked higher in the search engines. You can set up a blog at Blogger.com and promote your business there. Setting up a profile at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any of the other hundreds of social networks is a way to be seen and establish relationships with potential customers. Getting traffic to your blog, profile or answers on forums requires that you participate with other members of the network in a social way. Being too promotional will not win you any points with your audience and it may even get you penalized by the network itself. Doing advertisements on free online classifieds allows you to do more hard-core promotional (less social) advertising. When it comes to Safelists and Traffic Exchanges, the key is to come up with a short headline that compels whoever sees your ad to read further.

When it comes to paid internet advertising, pay per click (PPC), e zines (online magazines) and banner advertising are three popular choices. Pay per click can be very cheap, or it could be expensive. It all depends on how much you bid. If you have a low budget, you will want to bid low and on uncompetitive keywords (terms that people aren’t searching for very much). Luckily, it’s easy to find out what the uncompetitive keywords are in any of the search engines that you advertise on. They will provide you with the tools that help you identify keywords. Once you start getting some traffic and making money, you can gradually start to bid more on the keywords.

Ezine advertising prices vary greatly as well. The price you pay for advertising on an ezine depends on the size and quality of the subscriber list so you will need to research the best ezines and possibly go through some trial and error before you find some that consistently perform. Banner advertising is a way to promote your products on other sites that are ranked well in the search engines and not direct competitors. The internet advertising cost for this depends on the site that you choose as well.

Email marketing is another option but this requires either you have your own list or you use an email list rental service to send out your emails.  Once you build your own list email marketing is basically free the price of renting a list varies depending on if the list is targeted or generic.  A company like RentAList can get you started at a reasonable price.

Along with email marketing you can also look at a little ad in other people’s emails and ezines.  This is commonly called a top sponsor ad.  You have probably seen this where there is a little four line as at the top of an email you receive that promotes another site or project that isn’t covered in the email.  You can get these top sponsor ads from your friends, JV partners or use a service that provides top sponsor ads or from ezine publishers.

In order to perform effective internet advertising, you first need to understand your target market. It doesn’t matter what business you are in or what products/services you offer. If you are unable to learn what your potential customers are looking for, you might as well not even waste the money on advertising. So spend some time researching your target market until you have their wants and needs crystal clear in your mind.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. They probably receive pages and pages of spam every day. If you are sending out email advertisements, you need to figure out a way to distinguish yourself from the rest of the hype. One easy way to do this is to not be “hypey” yourself. Create and ad that is informational and problem-solving, rather than one that is all about buy, buy, buy.

The headline of your ad, whether it’s a banner, a PPC ad or an email ad, is extremely important. Your audience will make a decision on whether they want to continue or not based on your headline so it must be compelling. Ask a controversial question or provide some shocking information. Those work well. But it should all tie into the benefits your audience will receive from your products/services. Your headline should also be keyword optimized. Research what keywords you want to be targeting with any of the free keyword research tools.

Effective internet advertising is professionally written and designed. Make sure you don’t have any grammatical or spelling errors, don’t use too many colors or fonts and try to use some “proven effective” shades as well.

Remember that your ad must have a “call to action”. Many advertisers forget this important step. After you’ve peaked your target audience’s curiosity and sold them on your benefits, you need to tell them what to do. Show them where to click so that they will be directed back to your website or wherever it is that you want to lead them. Always have a way for the reader to get in contact with you. Don’t make them search for it.

Incorporate an opt-in form to your advertisement. This is where your reader will fill in his/her details. Offering a free trial or free informational guide are some ways to get your reader to fill out the opt-in contact information. Don’t make him/her fill in too much information. The more they are required to put in, the more they are likely to just not enter in their information.

The response you get is also enhanced with your personal touch. If you can follow up by making a phone call to each of the new members on your customer lead list, you are miles ahead of the game in terms of establishing your trust-worthiness and credibility.

Finally, keep yourself in tune with what the market is offering in terms of effective internet advertising–new and innovative technologies are constantly being developed.

Internet marketing and article marketing are not the same thing, because internet marketing is a broad concept with many smaller concepts beneath it, and article marketing is one of those smaller facets of internet marketing. The reason why these two concepts go hang in hand is because no internet marketing campaign is complete without some form of article marketing. Internet marketing and article marketing go hand in hand because using articles to market yourself, your website or your affiliate products is absolutely vital in creating a complete internet marketing solution.

There are numerous different types of internet marketing that you can take advantage of to get their name out there. However, most forms of internet marketing have costs of some sort, because advertising isn’t free. That is, advertising isn’t free unless you are advertising through article marketing. This unique form of marketing was popular long before ecommerce was a big thing. For as long as mass print methods have been available, businesses have been marketing themselves through article creation, by offering something of value to print medium like widely read newspapers in exchange for a byline or a small advertisement. When it come to ecommerce and internet marketing, article marketing is an excellent means for getting information out there and creating powerful links back to your website or affiliate products.

When it comes to article marketing, there are numerous benefits and features to consider.

• This form of marketing creates powerful links from popular websites back to your website or affiliate products. The more links you have coming to your website from other sources, the more powerful your website will be in search engine page listings like Google.
• By providing value in the articles that you create, you will be establishing yourself as a trusted authority on the keywords, niches or subjects that you are writing about. When readers know they can count on you for real, honest information, they will keep coming back for more.
• By adding a byline or resource box to your content you will be giving potential customers a way to contact you after reading your valuable content. Not only will this create powerful links, but it will also help connect additional traffic to your website that you would not normally be able to get.
• By creating articles optimized for search engines you will be improving your overall traffic and even your overall page rank by submitting to content sites with high page ranks and authority.

For these reasons, it is absolutely vital that article marketing be a facet of any internet marketing plan that you put together. While there may be a variety of different ways to market your internet site, one of the most powerful is to use valuable, easy to read article content with a call to action for readers who appreciate your work to visit your website for more information, products, a newsletter, and so on and so forth.

This post is in response to the comments made on my previous post #moonfruit Dominating Twitter With MacBook Pros.

There have been a couple of comments about going after the freebie seekers.

I did reply to these comments and I am going to elaborate here.

MoonFruit’s business model is targeted at freebie seekers.  They work with a free sign up and upsells, this means they are building a list of people that kind of fit into there target audience.

You will notice I said, “kind of” this is because the Twitter following they are building are people looking for a free MacBook Pro and not necessarily looking for a website.

With that said if they can get their followers away from the giveaway page and to their homepage they might end up with a decent sign up rate.

The service they provide is good for what they do but they aren’t promoting their service as much as they are the giveaway.  Most people don’t even know that they are also providing 5 years of their premium service.

This is the only area I see where they are missing the bus and I will grant them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they have their advertising push scheduled for after the giveaway is done.

But I still think they should make the point that they are giving away 5 years of their premium service a little more noticeable in their giveaway campaign.

This would get more people looking for the MacBooks reason to check out their Free Service offer.

Overall I think there are things they could do better, hopefully they do too, but the fact that they dominated the trending topics in twitter for two days with a term that most people didn’t know is still very impressive.

One other thing to point out is that of their 30,000+ followers most of them are real people.  Whereas I would bet that at least 20% of my 10,000+ followers are robots or people that never read the tweets.  I would also bet that the 20% is a very conservative number.

I would love to see a case study on this in the near future to see how well it did or didn’t work for them.

What about you?  Would you like to see a case study too?

Now I thought I was doing pretty good with twitter.  After all I have over 10,000 followers since May 18^th.  Roughly 6 weeks.

Most people would be happy with that.  But I want you to look at the top Trending Topic.

You might be like me and wonder what the heck is #moonfruit?

I honestly didn’t know and they have been around for ten years and they provide a website creation/hosting service.

Now you might be wondering (like I did) how did they get to be the #1 trending topic for two days in a row (so far)?

Simple they are giving away Free MacBook Pros! I will tell you how to get one later but for right now let me show what this has done for them and why they are dominating twitter.

First to win the MacBook Pro you have to be following them on twitter and this has resulted in their following growing by 30,000 in two days and still growing every minute of every day.

Now you might look at that and for some strange reason say, “That isn’t 30,000” as if 23,000 in two days wasn’t enough.

You are right that isn’t 30,000 because twittercounter.com doesn’t do live updates but here is a screen shot of their twitter account within minutes of capturing the counter you see above.

Now you see the 30,000 in two days and I guarantee that number is a lot higher now.

Remember this is being done totally within twitter.  Not with some big press release or a hugh email campaign or a ton of JV partners.

Now yes this will cost them roughly $20,000 because they are giving away 10 MacBook Pros and 10 – 5 year accounts with their service.  But in the long run it will most likely pay for itself because of the advertising they are getting on twitter.

I didn’t know what MoonFruit was and you might not have either but now at least 30,000 people do and have tweeted about it.

Do you want the chance to win a free MacBook Pro?

Here is what you have to do:

1.) You must be at least 16 years of age

2.) You must have a twitter account

3.) You must be following moontweet on twitter

4.) You must tweet at least once with #moonfruit in the tweet

That’s it! You can easily tweet it just by clicking on one of the twitter meme buttons at the top or bottom of this post.

By the way this only runs until July 10^th so if your are going to try to get one do it now.

Now if you don’t have $20,000 to spend to get a promotion like this together you might want to take a look at the Twitter Online System it won’t build your followers at a rate of 30,000 in two days but it will get you going the right way.

For more detail you can see the give away page here

Before I get into the details I want to make sure you realize this is not a free blog service.

This is an established blog already getting thousands of visitors per month and making an income.

It is on it’s own domain name and it’s own hosting.

Here is a screen shot of the traffic that I took today:

Visitors For The Month Of June

You can see that it averages over 100 visitors per day and all that traffic is coming from the search engines or social bookmarking sites as seen in this screenshot:

Sources of the traffic

If you do the math you will see that the total from the search engines almost matches the total visitors exactly.  These are not people I am sending to the site from my list.

Don’t worry if you are the lucky one to get the site you will be able to look at the full stats from your control panel.

Now comes the big question, “Why am I giving away a profitable site?”

There are a couple of reasons the first reason is that this is in a niche that I don’t have a true affinity for  and the site could be doing so much better if some one that enjoys this niche or is willing to learn this niche was working the site.

The second reason is that I am using it as promotion for my Blogging Beginners site.

At Blogging Beginners we teach the exact methods I used to create this site in under a week and then not do anything to it for months and still get traffic and income.  Again the income and traffic would be much higher if this was a niche I enjoyed working in.  I even have ideas and suggestions that would raise the income level on this site that I will share with the new owner when we give it away.

Now a little more about the giveaway.

This won’t be a random giveaway, we are looking for someone that will take the existing blog and use the techniques we teach at Blogging Beginners (yes, we will be giving away a Free Platinum Membership too)  to make this blog even more profitable.

You have to be a member of Blogging Beginners to be eligible for the giveaway but this isn’t a problem since you can sign up for free.

We will be giving away the blog on July 31, 2009

If you are interested just click anywhere you see the link to Blogging Beginners to sign up and get the case study for the site.  More information will follow after you sign up.

There are a number of methods that will make you money with Adwords but for every one that creates profits there are four or five that will put you in the poor house.

In this post I am going to talk about a couple of very popular (at least right now) adwords courses and let you decide if they might benefit you.

I will be talking about

The ClickBank Code and Keyword ESP.

Now by the name neither of these seem to be Adwords programs.

The ClickBank Code is actually a course that shows you how to make money with ClickBank using Adwords and Keyword ESP is actually a tool to help you optimize and set up Adwords accounts and the landing pages for those Adwords accounts.

Now on the face of it you would think that there isn’t much to compare with these two products but I will find a way.

First we will cover the main thing that sells products but doesn’t deliver to the end user, Hype.

This will be rated from 1 to 5 with 1 being no hype at all and 5 being a ton of hype.

HYPE

The ClickBank Code – 5 *****

Keyword ESP – 2 **

The ClickBank Code – This sales page is all hype.  I have purchased this and I have gone through the videos and I will tell you this read the sales page closely and anything that might be hype is.

We will start with the “newbie” claim right in the headline.

There is no way a “newbie” to Adwords made $11,000 in the first week using the techniques taught in the course unless they spent that much.  Look at it closer, it says, “ClickBank newbie”, not just newbie.  This is a person that already had experience marketing and probably a lot of experience with Adwords before he started promoting Adwords.

It is even quoted on the site, “But I’d never used Clickbank before February 09.” But he isn’t teaching ClickBank he is teaching Adwords. This is similar to a race car driver changing from Ford to Chevy and winning the first race he drove the Chevy in saying, “Newbie Chevy Racecar Driver Wins Every Race” even though he had years of experience with Ford.

The next item $48,506.88 first month – first month of Adwords or first month using his already established Adwords campaigns to promote ClickBank products.  This is one of those typical things where they show you the gross income but he doesn’t show you how much he spent on Adwords and any other expenses he might have had.  For all you know he spent $50,000 to make the $48,000.

Keyword ESP on the other hand has very little hype besides possibly exaggerating the ease of use of the software.  The software is easy to use but your landing pages do take a little more effort than it appears on the sales page.

They don’t even imply that you will make a fortune with this but they show you how to get more click thrus and lower you cost at the same time.

Winner of Hype Keyword ESP

Content

The ClickBank Code – 3 ***

Keyword ESP – 3 ***

The ClickBank Code has some excellent information on how to rate keyword campaigns before you launch them.  They even provide an Excel spreadsheet for you to test them before you actually launch the campaign, this is not an exact science but it is a great way to get idea for which way you should go.

The ClickBank Code would be higher except there are a couple of things in the content that a newbie shouldn’t apply unless they have a lot of money they can afford to lose.  For example they tell you to set your daily budget at $500 per day to test a campaign.  They also tell you to use, “hundreds or thousands” of keywords.  If you do this you will spend $500 per day with Adwords and who knows if your conversions ever make enough to pay for that.  This is the biggest reason people fail at Adwords is because they spend more then they can afford without having a proven campaign.

Since the sales page hype is targeted at newbies the content should be targeted at newbies and not be recommnend $500 per day to test a campaign.

If you avoid the high spend rates and the tons of keywords you can learn a lot about researching your campaign in this course.

The videos are easy to follow and stream nicely online but the download versions didn’t work for me.

One other thing to remember if you use this method to set up is that it takes about six weeks to get your first payment from ClickBank.  But you will get your bill from Adwords in four weeks or less so don’t plan on ClickBank money paying for your first bill.

Keyword ESP – this content is actually a bonus for buying the Keyword ESP tool.  With that said the content is broken down into four sections – Part Time adwords, Full time Adwords, Advanced Adwords and Dominate Organically.

This is all good information for a newbie starting out with Adwords he is careful to keep you controled while starting your account and testing your campaigns at lower levels before you commit to them but still provides the information to move you along to bigger and more profitable campaigns.

The one problem I have is the content is only available through the software, it is recorded in HD and not optimized for the internet.  This means with my DSL connection (not too fast in the islands) it takes me about 45 minutes to download and view a 15 minute video.  If you have dial-up you will have to wait a long time to see these videos.

Overall Keyword ESP wins this competition but they both have good qualities.

Personally, I think you should use the testing methods that are taught in The ClickBank Code and use the Adwords methods and the tools from Keyword ESP together.  But that would require purchasing both products.

If you are a newbie and just starting out and you were going to choose one of these two products I would recommend Keyword ESP because following these methods you are less likely to loose your shirt in Adwords fees the first month.

Either way if you are new to Adwords you should watch the Keyword ESP Video.  It is 68 minutes long and will give you some great content on how to start out.