I'm quite new to advertising. I failed at 3 online ventures because I didn't get any visitors to my websites. I'm therefore resolved to learn how to advertise. Other than experimenting with SEO, how would you recommend a new guy build his expertise with minimal financial risk of monetary loss? My sites are a bit too haphazard and disorganized to want to buy traffic for my sites. Any advice or tips would be great.
If you have valuable content on your site and update it daily,weekly ... you can get many visitors via dig and other networking sites ... if people find your content good they will share it post it on they're blogs so you will gain more link juice and raise in the search engines ... If you have medium content .... you can always use PPC to gain traffic ... but that costs so you actually have 2 business plans : 1. long term - valuable content, make the site grow virally etc 2. short term - PPC (Adwords,MSN,Yahoo,etc)
What niche are you into? Might give us a little more info to recommend a few different things. What methods to promote have you used so far? Did you use free advertising forums? Did you use safelists? Did you use classified ads? How bout article marketing? If you give us a little more info to what methods of promoting you have used and even a sneak peak at your sites we could make a few suggestions to perhaps spice up your site or more ways to market them. Might i suggest a great internet marketing forum i visit daily? You can learn a lot of new things about marketing and even get opinions about them...etc (DP forum is still a great resource but i'm just recommending a site i am at more then here. lol) http://www.conqueryourniche.com/forum/index.php (It's Free to register)
Then why are you bothering with anything? Seriously, get your stuff in order THEN market. In Vegas, we have a saying. You can win with scared money. Sure, we all would love a giant parachute attached to us when we leap out of the aircraft into the business arena, but that just not possible. Progress always involves risk. You want to minimize your risk? How about you get your sites/products in order before going forward. That's step one. Your next step is to test. Go to Google AdWords and buy some traffic. If it's not converting, you know that it's not worth wasting your time as things stand. Time to fix and test again. So many people do things ass backwards. There's no use submitting 1,000 articles, getting 5,000 links and everything else if your stuff isn't going to make money to begin with. Let me give you a quick example. Imagine you just wrote an ebook and put up a landing page for it. Before doing all sorts of crap, you should hit Ad Words and send traffic to it. Okay, imagine that you bought 500 highly-targeted visitors to your site and there's no sales. Should you then worry about marketing? Of course not. Your site is faulty. Next, you make changes and send another 500. This time you get 10 orders (2%). You now know what your marketing efforts are likely to bring and can start to formulate your time/profit ratio. Is 2% good enough? If not, fix and test again. As for learning advertising, that's a broad question. What "type" of advertising do you want to learn? I'd buy a couple used books from Amazon if you really want to learn how to sell people. Forums are fine, but if you're "green" forums can hurt you. There's far too many people with no experience, no real earnings and no knowledge spewing out comments and "info." At least with a little education under your belt, you can weed out the BS and focus on the good stuff. Anyway, good luck.
Your pitch is critically important, and buying adwords traffic is definitely a way to find our very quickly if you have things right. But not everyone has the money to burn on an adwords campaign. I suggest you study already successful sites. Join affiliate networks and CPA networks. Take a look at their highest converting/EPC offers. Study their layouts; analyze WHERE on the page they positioned things. You will begin to see similarities. Emulate them into your own design. If you have more time than money, then work on free traffic. Then again, if you're selling a product that is not in high demand, you could be spinning your wheels. If there is a lot of competition for your product, then you might be fine proceeding because if there wasn't competition, then there wouldn't be any money flowing in that niche.
My first venture was networkbits.net which has valuable information (with some affiliate links) and an auto-generated store attached to it. I did go through and alter most pages in the store looking for some free traffic from the search engines (long tail - SEO). I've also put up 12 auto generated stores (e-bay data feeds) with minimal labor. You can see buyMRO.net, PhotographyTools.NET and BuyCheapCameras.NET for examples. With no exceptions I have only tried to use SEO to get traffic. Mostly I used signature links in a multitude of forms with occasional blog commenting. I do have links from Wikipedia which bring in enough traffic for the ad money to equal the hosting costs. I'm hoping to submit some articles to article directories sometime in the next two months. Ultimately I want to learn how to get visitors/customers rather than further any business goal. Once I know how to do this, I will go back and build a solid business. I realize I may loose some money on ads learning, but want to limit this as my goal isn't so much to make money.
I want to learn to fly a plane by just jumping in the cockpit while it's in mid-flight. I'll read the instructions later. Sadly, this is exactly what many people do. And we hear from them year and year as they are still trying to "get off the ground." Traffic isn't rocket science. 1. PPC (like Google AdWords) 2. Write/submit articles. Keep em coming. 3. Social bookmark and try to get those people (usually junk traffic, but possible SEO benefits). 4. Participate in forums in your niche and mention your site (sig tag, casual conversaiton, etc). 5. Build a mailing list for your niche. Feed it with content and sales promos. 6. Create pages on places like Squidoo (called Lenses there). Promote the page, use the page to get people to your site(s), etc. 7. Submit site to directories. 8. Comment on blogs, Yahoo! Answers, etc. There's no real secret here. The reason people fail is because: 1. They don't know where they are going (no plan) and can't focus. 2. They don't have their product/service in order first. Also remember one thing: people gravitate toward quality solutions. If you want to have lasting power, follow that.
You can submit your index page to Google's ODP directory, this should help to give you better page rank.
TheList.FM/Advertising. Just read the free tips, and perhaps that may get you going. Just don't give up.
Dear Regrouping-webmaster, Step One: Never Give up Step 2: search, Read, learn ,search, read, learn...... Step 3: DO NOT Stop search, Read, learn Step 4: Never Give up Step 5: be open to feed backs but don't get disappointed. When you start anything mistakes are given, Remember internet changing everyday. I am telling you every single day I learn something new in this site. Step 6: trail and error. If something is not working, STOP, use another method ..... Step 7: NEVER GIVE UP Good Luck
PS/ I know bunch of people who had no idea what internet or computers were all about and now they are making afew $1000 on line