The Full Guide to Advertising

Welcome to the guide which will hopefully explain to you all of the advertising techniques and options that you have when you want more traffic to your website. It should explain what methods you should follow for your website in order to reach this, and to actually have an effect on your traffic.

First of all, you need to know this. Most of the methods you’ll see below will require money to be spent. Afterall, if you don’t spend anything, you can’t expect a big effect on your website.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising
This is one of the more common types of advertising. I’m sure you will all have heard of Google Adwords, Bidvertiser, Adbrite etc… which all provide two services - Publishing and Advertising. If you advertise, your advertisement will be shown on a lot of the publisher’s websites. Publishers earn money for when people click on the advertisements. Doing it this way means that your site will be shown on loads of different websites, which will increase awareness of your website. It also means that the people who have clicked your advertisement must be interested in your website, so thats good if you’re selling products.

One of the downsides of it however is that there is a lot of fraudulent clicks around. This happens when other people click advertisements on someones website purposely to make more money for the publishers. This means that advertisers are “scammed” out of their money because the traffic is useless, these people just take your site off straight away.

Cost-Per-Mille Advertising
Cost-Per-Mille (CPM for short) is also pretty common. This is like the same as Pay-Per-Click, but instead of paying per click, you pay for every 1,000 impressions that your advertisement is shown on one of the publishers sites. This is another good way to create awareness of your website, but unfortunately, it often doesn’t generate the traffic amount that you’d want, and its also easily frauded because people can just refresh the page to generate fake impressions.

Pay-Per-Play Advertising
This is not as common because Pay-Per-Play has been started by one company at the moment (Called NetAudioAds). The network is getting stronger everyday with more publishers and advertisers coming in. This is also like the other two, but you pay for every impression that your audio advertisement is played. This can be quite effective because the prices aren’t that expensive, but nobody really knows how much traffic it will bring to your website. The network of advertisers is also full of small advertisers like pizza shops running special offers, which is a very interesting idea. The best part about it is that you can target specific areas of where you want to advertise, which means if your website is about something local, you can easily advertise to that area and bring in decent traffic that you need.

Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is a very common way of advertise because of the numerous amounts of websites currently running it. Some of the more popular Social Bookmarking websites are Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. Social Bookmarking is where people can bookmark your website into their profile so that other people who see their profile can visit your website. Some of them provide slightly different though like Digg.com, which is a voting website where people can “Digg” your webpage/website so it ranks higher, therefore giving you more traffic. This is a mainly free method, but you can (not fully recommended) spend a bit of money to get people to bookmark it or vote for it to get more traffic. Some people provide services such as 50 stumbles for $10 for example. This is a good way to go, but if the website finds out about it, you could be banned from that website, so you need to be careful.

Directories
If you want to, you could submit your websites to directories. If you don’t know what a directory is, its basically a big database of websites that are shown on a website to give more traffic and backlinks. Again, this is mainly a free method apart from the big directories that charge you for a link, but you can pay people to submit your website to directories, such as 100 directories for $10 or something like that. Directories don’t generally bring much traffic but you can’t forget that backlinks are also important as well.

Blog Posts
If you were quite desperate, you could pay people so you can submit a blogpost on their blog. The amount that this costs is dependant on how popular the blog is, how many pages are indexed etc… so don’t be suprised if the owner wants a lot of money for a blogpost. This can generate traffic for your website, and again, backlinks. If you wanted a good effect from it, I’d recommend paying for blogposts on the bigger and more popular blogs because the smaller ones probably won’t do much for you, but afterall, it is your choice.

Text Link Ads
I’d be quite suprised if you haven’t heard of this company. Text Link Ads are a company that provides a service rather like the Pay-Per-Click system where they have advertisers and publishers. However, with this, Advertisers pay to have links on the publisher’s websites, and publishers make money from having links on there. The prices are quite cheap, and the backlinks may be good, but there is still one major problem with them. Google hate Text Link Ads. If Google finds out that you’ve been using Text Link Ads, you could expect a penalty in the Search Engine Results and maybe even a full de-index! If you still want to use them, go to text-link-ads.com.

Buying Links
This is yet another risky method. You can buy links on other people’s websites. It may just be a one-time payment, or you may have to pay monthly or yearly to keep the link on the website. Google are starting to crack down on people doing this though, so if you really must do so, try to keep it “behind closed-doors” so you don’t get caught. You can find a lot of people buying and selling links at Digital Point Forums. You could probably get some good deals there.

Buying Banners
This is just like Buying Links, but instead you’re buying advertising space on other people’s websites. Google seems to be fine with this one because it doesn’t really effect your backlinks, only your traffic. You can advertise on some popular websites for cheap prices, and thats the good thing about this method. If you plan on using this method, you have to make sure that you’re advertising on a site thats related to yours. If you follow that, you’ll get more traffic from it because most people won’t click a dog food advertisement on a website about SEO, right?

Search Engine Submission
This isn’t really an advertising method, its just doing the basics that you need to do. This can be a free method if you decide to do it manually by submitting to lots of Search Engines, but there are groups of people who say they will submit you to thousands of big and small Search Engines. Now going on Search Engines is definately a good thing if it gets you more traffic, but the problem is, how much traffic will these smaller Search Engines actually give you? Sure, it may be cheap at $10 - $20 maybe, but will you actually get any traffic from it? This is a risk that you have to think about before you actually purchase the service, you need to be sure about what you’re going to do. There is no point in wasting money if you personally don’t think you’ll get anything out of it.

RSS Feeds
This method mainly applies to blogs, but it can also apply to directories, forums etc… Of course, to do this method you need to have an RSS Feed. If you use a blog software like Wordpress, then you should already have an RSS Feed whether you knew it or not. With other websites, you may have to search on Google to find out how to actually do it for your type of website. Basically, this method works on you submitting your RSS Feed to special RSS Feed Directories. These Directories are like ordinary Directories, but they only hold RSS Feeds. This may bring in a small amount of traffic, but it is a free method afterall, but you can pay people (as usual) to submit you to them. My advice is that don’t spend too much money on this method because you won’t get that much traffic from them, but still, its worth doing.

Forum Signatures
If you’ve ever been on a forum, you should know that you are allowed to have a signature attached to your profile, and this signature can be applied to the bottom of every post you make on that forum. The good thing is, you can put your website link in this signature. That way you’ll get backlinks and traffic. This is a free method, it simply depends on how often you make posts on the forum. Of course, you could take the simple way out and pay someone for a signature link in their profile if they make a lot of posts because then it makes your job a lot easier, but of course it does cost money.

E-Mails
This isn’t really recommended because it can be seen as spam, but if you do it right, it can be very effective. Basically, if you can get a list of thousands of e-mail addresses, you could send an e-mail to all of these people with an advertising message for your website. Most people will simply delete it because nobody likes spam, but you might get a few visitors from it.

The method I suggest is that you make a newsletter sort-of thing, and you give a special gift for everyone who signs up to that newsletter, such as a piece of software, discounts, reports etc… because that way, you should end up with a big list of e-mail addresses, and you are free to advertise to them. It may give you more traffic than simply spamming people.

Another E-mail advertising way is to just send e-mails normally, but put your website link in your e-mail signature, like a forum. This way is completely free and easy, it may even bring you in a few extra visitors.

Yahoo + Google Groups
This is a decent way of advertising too. It is mainly used by proxies though, but it can have some effect for other types of websites too. Both Yahoo and Google run a Groups service. You can create a group, and then let other people join this group. Then, people can advertise by sending messages to all of the group. The more members in the group, the more effective it is. There is no point in advertising to groups which have 10 - 100 members maybe, try to advertise in the bigger ones, such as 1,000 members or more. This method is highly recommended for proxies, it can be very effective.

MySpace
This is a very specific way of advertising, and its again, mainly used by proxies. If you don’t already know, MySpace.com is a website with millions of members, and its a good way for people to talk to their friends through it. The good thing is, if you can spend the time to make a lot of friends on MySpace, you can easily send advertising messages to them all and bring in a high amount of traffic. The reason this method is used mainly by proxies is because generally, the MySpace members are under-18 which means they’re probably still at school, and proxies give them the freedom they want at school, so advertising proxies on myspace is a great way, although it can take time to get a lot of legit members.

There we go, you have a long list of advertising methods that you could use for your website. Make sure you try out a variety of the methods and don’t just stick to one method all the time, if you have a variety, you should find that its more effective by reaching out to a more variety of audience.

Stumble it!