How Much Does Internet Advertising Cost

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.