Advertising Programs

1. Ad Blasters

There are more ways to advertise on the Internet than Carter has liver pills but this is by far the worst of the lot. Someday somebody is going to bring these companies to court and sue them for every dime they have. This is the most worthless form of advertising on the Internet, hands down.

I could write a book on Ad Blasting software and services by itself but for the sake of keeping this web site under a zillion pages I will make this as brief as I can and still give you all the info that you need.

Ad blasting software or companies are just that. The basic premise is this. You type a one line ad and URL, put it in the software or place with the submission company and your ad and URL are put on literally millions of sites for the whole Internet population to see. On the surface this sounds like the greatest thing since sliced bread. The problem is this. NOBODY, and I do mean NOBODY sees these ads. Why? I'll try to explain.

The sites these ads get posted to are FFA and classified sites. Years ago when the first FFA site came into existence this was actually a great thing. There were very few of these sites and blasters didn't exist. So you had to physically go to the site to post your ad. Thus, while you were there you saw other people's ads and a lot of actual business was done. What happened was this. When the FFA owners saw how much traffic they were getting they started renting out advertising space on their sites to other companies, usually in the form of banner ads. These companies made a lot of sales through these banner ads and the FFA sites made a lot of money from charging for this ad space. Well, when other people started to see how profitable this was they came up with their own FFA sites and did the same thing. Gradually the number of FFA sites increased to the point where you couldn't physically go to all the sites to post your ads any longer. There were just too many of them. So some genius, who should really be hung up by his toes and left for the vultures invented the Ad Blaster software. With this software you could blast your ad to ALL those FFA sites with one click and zillions of people would see your ad. Well, the problem is, EVERYBODY started using this thing. It sold like hot cakes and this man made a fortune. Unfortunately since EVERYBODY was using the software to blast their ads NOBODY was physically going to the sites anymore. Therefor, NOBODY was seeing these ads anymore. FFA sites became a ghost town. Eventually other blasters and submission companies were created, which only made the problem worse. Now the argument by these companies was that the main purpose was to get more links to your site and therefor increase your ranking in the search engines. But the search engines became wise to this and stopped counting these links. So now all these ads don't even help your search engine rankings.

Eventually blasters branched out to submit to safelists, message boards, classified sites and search engines directly. They are all worthless. Please do yourself a favor. Don't waste your money or your time on these things. It is only an exercise in typing. I can think of a zillion things to do with my time that are better than blasting ads. My final words on this subject. DON'T DO IT!

2. Safelist Advertising

Another form of advertising that many years ago was actually quite excellent. As a matter of fact it was probably the BEST form of advertising around.

A safelist is basically a site where a group of people join and agree to receive emails from other members. That's why they are called safelists because it is safe to send ads to these people and not have to worry about SPAM complaints. And like I said, years ago this was great. But as the number of safelists increased people started joining more and more of them and the number of emails they received started to get out of control. Many ISP services could not handle the volume of email people were getting and boxes were getting filled up. Thus, a lot of email ads weren't getting delivered. So another genius came up with the bottomless email account. These were email accounts that literally had so much room to receive emails that you'd never run out of space. But he didn't stop there. He made it so that if you wanted, the email box would be auto cleaned EVERY NIGHT. In other words, all those thousands of emails you got from the hundred or so safelists you joined, were ALL gone when you woke up the next morning, which means you didn't read ONE EMAIL. As with the ad blasters, this is something that EVERYBODY started doing. Therefor what was happening was that NOBODY was reading their safelist emails anymore. Therefor NOBODY was making any sales. Another great medium of advertising ruined by technology. Now unlike FFA sites, there are still a few people who only belong to one or two safelists and DO read their emails. So safelist advertising isn't as bad as FFA posting. You will make a few sales if you write a good ad and have a good product but you won't be able to live off of this method. I make about 1 sale a month through safelists. I only spend about 5 minutes each day submitting to them because I know it's not worth much more of my time than that.

The most responsive Safelist I have found is Herculist. It is NOT free but it is worth the $49.95 a year to join. I more than make my money back from it. As a matter of fact it's where I get almost ALL of my safelist sales from. The rest of them I find to be pretty worthless except for one FREE one which actually is very good too. My remaining sales (about 3 a year) come from that one.

Here are the links if you are interested in joining...

HERCULIST SAFELIST

CASH4U SAFELIST

3. Search Engine Submission

Of all the myths propagated by the Internet community, this has to be near the top of the list. First, just a brief explanation of what a search engine is. A search engine is a site that you go to in order to find something on the Internet. There are more search engines than you can imagine. The most popular are:

Google
Vivisimo
Yahoo
About
AskJeeves
Dogpile
MSN
Kartoo
Alltheweb
DMOZ

This is based on a nationwide survey of the people who actually USE search engines. And don't get me wrong, for finding information search engines are great. But for finding a business opportunity you'd have better luck throwing darts at a Sherman Tank. But I digress.

Using a search engine is actually quite easy. You go to the main page of whatever search engine you prefer and type what it is you're looking for in the search text box and click on search. The engine will then give you a list of results, about 10 or 20 per page which you can actually customize to your liking in some cases. Didn't find what you're looking for on page one? Just click on the next page link at the bottom of the page. This will bring you to the next 10 or 20 results. When you find what it is you're looking for you click on the link of that particular result and the search engine will send you to the page you requested. I can't tell you how many times I've used search engines to do research. But I would NEVER use them to find a business opportunity. Here is why.

The best way to explain this is with an example. Let's say I wanted to find someone to design my web site for me in order to start my business. My Google search comes up with 4,466,667 pages, not results, PAGES. That comes out to about 90 million actual web designers. Now that's great for me as I have a lot to choose from, comparing price, services offered, etc. But what about for the poor guy who is listed on page 4,466,667? Do you think ANYONE is ever going to see HIS listing? You know what? Forget about page 4,466,667. The poor guy on page FOUR is NEVER going to get a hit to his web site. Why? Because it has been proven that your average search engine searcher doesn't go beyond page 3 of his or her search. Rarely do they ever go beyond page 1. The reason is because the top searches are listed first and in most cases these are the best companies anyway. Okay, so you're thinking, "No problem. I'll just keep submitting my link to these search engines everyday and eventually I'll get a page 1 listing." All I can say is I hope you have a cryogenetisist who can freeze you for about 200 years because that's how long it's going to take you to make it up to page 1, when everybody else is dead. The people at the top of the search engines are there NOT because of search engine optimization but because they paid through the nose for these spots. How much? Anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 per year for EACH search engine. And the reason I know this is true is because a site that I did a couple of years ago, racehippie.com, spent thousands on search engine optimization. I told them beforehand that it was pointless but they wanted it done anyway. So I went ahead and did it. Pulled out all the stops and made sure their site was as optimized as possible. Did all the submissions, paid, so we got a better spot and to THIS DAY they still haven't made it up to page 10. And there are only 60,000 page results for nascar racing, which is the topic they feature. My point is this. You CAN'T win the search engine wars. It's a war you can't win and whatever money you do spend on it is wasted. This is the first thing I tell people who want me to design a web site for them. The truth is, most people don't need a web site because it won't do them any good anyway because nobody is going to find it unless they mortgage their future to get a top listing. So search engines are NOT the way to go for promoting your business.

4. Traffic Exchange Programs

Another one of the biggest waste of times on the Internet. A traffic exchange is where you sign up with a site and in order to get traffic to YOUR site you agree to view other people's sites. For each web page you view you get one free visitor to your site. The site's software tracks each of your clicks for you. You need to spend about 30 to 60 seconds at each site before you go to the next one. So in the course of an 8 hour day, if you wasted that much time doing this, you will probably earn about 500 visitors to your web site. Now you're probably thinking, "Well, that's not so bad. Certainly ONE of those 500 people will buy my product or sign up with my program." Well, here is the problem. And if you think about it, it makes sense. While you're doing your part to view all these sites in order to earn visitors to YOUR site are you REALLY interested in seeing the sites that are there? No, of course not. You're just clicking away to earn your traffic. Well, guess what? That's what everybody else is doing as well. Some people even have multiple traffic exchanges open at once. They go bouncing from page to page clicking away, not even looking at the page that was there let alone read it. I did Traffic Exchanges years ago. I did them for 14 hours a day. I put a hit tracker on my site to see how many times it came up. I would get over 1000 hits a day. NOT ONE SALE. Please do yourself a favor. If you see any ads for Traffic Exchanges ignore them. They are TOTALLY WORTHLESS.

5. Banner Exchange Programs

If you go to just about any web site today you will notice that there aren't quite as many banners as there used to be. Why? Because for some reason the Internet community has fallen out of love with banners. Very few people click on them anymore. So obviously a banner exchange program isn't going to be worth much. Plus it is very hard to even get one these days because there aren't that many around anymore.

The basic premise is you agree to post a banner of some other company on your site in exchange for them posting a banner for your site on theirs. Their are so many problems with this I can't cover them all but I will cover the main problems and the only ones that matter.

1. Most sites will charge you to put your banner up if they are a site with a lot of traffic. They certainly don't need your traffic so if you want theirs you will have to pay for it, and in many cases more money than it's worth.
2. A site that doesn't have a lot of traffic that is willing to put your banner up for free is pretty worthless anyway. Think about it. They don't have a lot of traffic. They are in the same boat that you're in. So how much good are they going to do you?
3. How many banners of other people's can you actually put up on your site? You don't want your main page flooded with them so their are 2 options. One is you use a rotating banner where each time your page is displayed a different banner is shown. Well, guess what? That is what the other sites are doing as well. So the number of views you get are minimal. The other option is you put up a separate page of banners. But most sites won't like this and won't agree to it figuring nobody is going to go to that page. Guess what? They're right. The result is they pull your banner from their page.

6. Message Board Posting

Actually one of the better forms of advertising online though not great. Message boards are just that. Sites where people go to post their messages. There are some sites that are dedicated to posting messages specifically for business opportunities. You will actually get responses from these sites but here is the main problem. These sites are so popular that people literally flood them with ads. You can post your ad at 2:22 PM and by 2:52 it is off the page. So if you want to get any kind of exposure at all you have to live at these sites and post your ads every half hour or so. There are literally thousands of message boards on the Internet. So you can see that this is NOT an easy thing to keep up with. And forget about the message board blasters because the sites that accept these don't have any real visitors so you won't get any results from them anyway.

Basically I don't kill myself over these. I post a few ads a day and hope for the best. I'll make a few sales a month and considering it's free I'm not complaining. But if you are thinking of making it your main source of promotion you are going to be in for a very long, hard time of it. You won't ever make any real money posting to message boards. If you are interested in posting to a few just do a Google Search for "Message Boards" and you'll find quite a few to choose from. Just stay away from the ones that accept blaster submissions.

7. Forums

You can't actually advertise on forums but I am including them here because they are a great place to gain exposure for yourself. If you contribute to the forums in way of helping others, it will be as good as advertising in the long run. It does take a while to build a reputation so be patient. One of the best forums is Work at Home with WhyDoWork.com

8. BLOGS

The difference between a message board and a BLOG is that message boards are a place you go to in order to post your ad. A BLOG is a site that YOU set up yourself to post your own observations, links to other sites and if you like, ads to YOUR programs. The problem with BLOGS is no different than simply trying to promote your own web site. How are you going to get people to see it? Just having it on the Internet isn't going to get it seen and I've already been over search engine optimization and how worthless that is. So trying to advertise your business through your BLOG is like trying to catch overflowing water from a sink with a tea strainer. These are great for having fun and putting up just about anything you like, but for serious advertising they aren't very practical. At least the message boards have a good steady stream of traffic coming in so for that 30 minutes or so your ad will be seen. BLOGS? They may be here to stay but they're not going to make you much money.

9. E-Zine Advertising

Many years ago E-Zine advertising was actually an excellent form of promoting your product or service. But those days are long gone. Before I explain why let me first explain what an E-Zine is.

An E-Zine is an online electronic magazine. It comes in the form of an email sent to it's subscribers. You don't have to worry about getting the subscribers as the E-Zine owner takes care of that part. What he then does is charge people a fee to send THEIR ad in one of his E-Zine issues. Years ago when this was very effective these fees were astronomical, some as much as $100 per ad. Today, prices have come down a lot. The main reason is because of the SPAM filters ISP services put on their email programs. Many of the E-Zines just don't get through. As a result many E-Zines have actually closed up shop because they just couldn't afford to send out their emails when they weren't getting delivered to a lot of people. The good part of this is the fees have come down. The bad part is that your ad isn't going to be read by a lot of people unless you can find an E-Zine with a large subscriber base of at least a few thousand people.

If you are interested in trying E-Zine advertising these are the basic steps:

1. Do a Google search for E-Zines.
2. Try to find a listing that lists its member base
3. Write to the owner telling him you want to place an ad with his E-Zine and ask what his fees are. Then wait for his response and instructions on how to submit your ad.

10. Bulk Lead Purchases

This is absolutely the BEST way...to get your ISP to shut you down. Bulk lead purchases are basically just that. You go to a site online that specializes in this service and you buy X number of leads from them. You can buy as many as you like. The price per lead is astronomical. Each lead can cost as much as 30 cents. So if you buy 1000 leads it's going to cost you about $300. Right away I can tell you that even if these leads were good there is no way you're going to get your money back from whatever sales you make from them. Why? Because it is a known fact of marketing that you are only going to sell to about 3% of those people. That means at best you will make 30 sales and that's IF the leads are good. At $300 cost you would have to make a profit of $10 per each sale to break even. The problem with these leads is they are NOT only NOT good but they are HARVESTED. In other words these people have no idea they are going to get your email. They are not targeted, meaning they may in no way be interested in YOUR product or service and in most cases they will report you to your ISP for sending SPAM and get you shut down. So because these leads are SO bad I am not going to tell you how to do this. Pretend this method of advertising does not exist but please be aware that it does and if ANYONE tries to sell you on bought leads I suggest very strongly that you run for the hills.

11. Google AdWords

Finally we have a glimmer or hope. Google AdWords on the surface appears to be a great way to get your ad seen and not have to pay a fortune for it to make a sale. The way AdWords works is basically like this...

You pick the product you want to sell, your own or maybe one of Clickbanks. You open your account and set up your advertising campaign by picking your keywords, writing your ad, designate how much you want to spend on each click, and how much you want to spend per day. Then you just let the ads run. Sounds very simple on the surface. But the pitfalls are too numerous to go into here. For starters there's picking a product that has a high conversion rate. There's figuring out how much you want to spend per click and per day. Then there's the wording of your ads themselves, which can make or break your campaign. In other words there are way too many places a person can screw this up if they don't know what they're doing.

Fortunately, I found a book that goes through the whole Google process from beginning to end, how to pick a product, how to write your ads, pick keywords, set how much to spend per click, and a whole lot of things that I can't get into in this short space. The book in a nutshell is a must have for anyone who wants to be successful with Google AdWords. I don't make a fortune with this stuff but for each product I sell I make a profit after expenses of about $200 per month. Sell 5 products and you'll net about $1000 per month. I have NEVER had a month using Google AdWords where I lost money. It just won't happen if you know what you're doing. This book will make it so that you will. At least it did for me.

Here is the URL if you are interested.

GOOGLE ADWORDS BOOK

Please be warned. Without this book you are looking for SERIOUS trouble promoting anything on Google. You CAN lose your shirt. In other words...

HERE WE GO AGAIN...!!!

"Come on Steve, you're KILLING ME. You make it sound like most forms of advertising on the Internet just don't work." Sadly my friend, they don't. But there is one that is truly off the charts if you know how to use it and WHAT programs in this form to use.

Drum roll please...

12. FFA Hosting

If you are scratching your head thinking that I have lost my mind, I haven't. Yes, I know. I said that posting to FFA sites was a waste of time (See Ad Blasters) because NOBODY sees those ads. Well, I'm not talking about posting to those sites. I'm talking about HOSTING ONE YOURSELF. Think about it. You know that zillions of people post to these sites. What you don't know and I didn't tell you is that they agree to get an email in return from each hoster. That is what they agreed to in exchange for getting to put THEIR ad on YOUR site. Well, guess what? When you send your email to them they DO see it. We know it's going to get through to them because they had to respond to one in order to validate their post in the first place. So now you have a captive audience to pitch your business or product to. And believe me, if you're selling something that is going to help these people make money they will jump all over it. Why? Because they are posting worthless ads and NOT making any money. Do you see the beauty of this system? The man who thought of doing this is a genius.

But there is one VERY BIG PROBLEM with this. Do you have any idea how many FFA sites there are out there? Millions. You obviously can't host them all. You'd go broke. So which ones to host? I hosted one site that literally got NO posters. I know this for a fact because ads that got me tons of replies from other FFA sites got me ZERO from this site. After ONE YEAR of hosting this site and not getting one CLICK let alone any sales, I gave up. So again the problem with this method is, with all the FFA sites out there how do you know which ones to host?

A personal friend of mine solved this problem. He put together a book of the BEST FFA sites on the Internet to host. Hands down these are the best and no other ones even come close. Now you could probably figure this out on your own after about a year or so. But isn't your time worth anything at all to you? I know it was to me. And quite honestly the small price of this book was worth it to me to get the best advertising the Internet has to offer. The income I make from these sites is nothing short of amazing considering how little they cost, some as low as $10 a month.

Anyway, if you are interested in what is without a doubt the best book on the Internet that will teach you what you'll need to know to make $1000 a month realistically here is the URL...

BEST FFA SITES BOOK

This is truly the one form of advertising on the Internet that I can say I am proud to endorse. But you STILL have to know how to write an ad. We'll be getting to that soon. But first it's time to get to the next part of our reviews section. PROGRAM AIDS