General advertising and promotion - Multiple streams of Traffic: PART II

You are free to publish this article online in your ezinewebsite, ebook, or other online publication. The fullresource box, including 'By line' must remain intact and bepublished with the article.If you publish this article, please contact me and let meknow where you are using it.Contact at: artpub@newbie-guides.com---**Article info**Word count: 1085 approximatelyHard-wrapped at 65 characters---General advertising and promotion - Multiple streams of Traffic: PART IIThere are a variety of ways that you can advertise and promote your site or products. In this, Part II of the 'mini-series' on Multiple streams of traffic, I'd like to take a look at a couple of the more commonly known methods of online promotion. Some are much better than others, and some are more suitable than others. Our goal then is to look a little more closely at them to determine if they are suitable for your needs. Read on for more...Banner adsUsing banner advertising and displaying banner ads on your site has changed a lot in the last 2 years. The cost and value (benefit) of banner advertising has dropped significantly. I won't talk about them too much other than to say that their main use is now principally as 'branding' tools. A way to get your name/product/site in the front of people's faces quickly. For the average person, it is nearly impossible to get the kind of reach required to really get much benefit from banners. Thatbeing said, if you can get good exposure in a niche that fits your market, go for it, it won't hurt.On the other side of things, displaying banners on your site as a source of revenue is only worthwhile if you are getting thousands upon thousands of hits/month. The average CPM is now only about $2.00 (that means you earn $2.00 for every 1000 banners displayed!). Considering that when you display a banner on your site you are promoting a product or site that is not your own, you are giving visitors an exit that does not generateincome for you. It isn't any wonder that the top onlinemarketers (Cory Rudl, Jimmy D. Brown,Ken Evoyetc.) don't display ANY ads (banners or anything) from any other site.I am not knocking banners here. They serve a purpose. You justneed to be sure that they suit your purposes. I have found that the FastClick Ad Networkprovides very good service for all your banner advertising needs.FFA's and traffic swapsLet me be very blunt about FFA's. They are a waste of time for anyone except the person who owns it. No matter what the claims may be, they will not produce traffic. Traffic swaps and exit exchanges have to potential to produce reasonably large amounts of traffic, however the problem is that for the most part it is untargeted. Most traffic swaps are based on a system of credits,where your site gets a visitor in exchange for displaying the traffic swap link on your site, or visiting a member site yourself. The real problem is that much of the traffic is simplyother webmasters trying to boost their own credits. They are notinterested in visiting your site except to get the credit. I'm sure you can see the problems with that. In a way, you can think of traffic swaps as an online equivalent of a highway detour. Lots of traffic gets re-directed your way, but it doesn't really want to be there. If you are interested in learning more about traffic swaps, you can go here to take a look at a popular one.More recently, a slightly different breed of traffic swap has emerged. These focus on generating ezine subscribers. The way they work is basically the same as the a normal traffic swap, however because they are directed specifically at getting subscribers, they don't create junk traffic. Every time you display the pop-up containing the ezine registration form, you earn an impression for your subscription link on another site. When visitors see the pop-up with the links, they choose to sign up for your ezine. There are still very few of them around, so they are very effective and produce good results. There are a few services that provide opt-in services for a fee (usually in the range of $1.00/subscriber), but I prefer free ;-). I have had very good results with this service.It is 100% free and generates dozens of subscribers a week.Ezine advertisingEzine ads (both solo and classified ads) can be very effective ifdone right. They can also be utterly useless. The key is to getyour ads in ezines that are very closely related to your product(s), and that don't run tons of ads. There are literally thousands of ezines out there that are essentially advertising rags. Their only purpose is to run ads for you and every other person willing to spend $15. Before you advertise in any ezine, get some information about the ezine. A decent publisher will know their subscriber base and be able to tell you with reasonable accuracy how responsive the subscribers are, how many ads they run, and if someone has recently run an ad like yours (similar products). If they can't do that, you might want to think twice about advertising with them. Realistically what you want is an ezine witha reasonably large subscriber base (1000 or more), that is closely related to your product, and only accepts limited advertising (e.g. 1 ad/issue). Stephan Peirce's book goes into great detail on how to find good ezines and what tolook for and what to avoid - it costs less than a solo ad in a decentezine, and will save you tons of money in avoided mistakes.A final comment:Anyone who claims they can provide you with 100,000 (500,000,whatever) guaranteed visitors is selling junk. Think of it this way, if it were so easy to get that many targeted visitors (and you only want targeted visitors), you can bet companies (scammers)wouldn't be selling them because they would be raking in millionsin profits by directing those visitors to their own products and sites! Do a little math, 1% conversion (a very low rate) from 100,000 visitors = 1,000 buying visitors. Sell a $10 product andyou have $10,000. If such a profit is possible, why the hell is this kind of traffic sold for $50-$200? Quite simply because it is junk traffic, frequently created by piggy backing on trafficexchanges and FFA's.In the next section of the series we will start to look at some of the less well known methods of traffic generation, and how you can put them to use to generate a more stable and consistent baseof traffic for your own sites.---------------------------Eric Koshinsky: webmaster and guide at Newbie-guides.comWe aim to provide useful tips and guidance for those whoare new to personal online marketing. Learn more aboutprograms, techniques, and software that can help youreach your online marketing goals. Come on by and have a look.http://www.newbie-guides.com/?aaJoin our newsletter: news@newbie-guides.com