Posted on Sunday, 21st December 2008 by Jeff
When Adbrite.com first launched off their website, they had lots of great deals on advertising space. I recall buying advertising space for as little as $.50 per week and getting a much better return on my investment than with pay-per-click. You could also scale the hell out of your campaign while still paying an extremely low CPC. Unfortunately, Adbrite figured their company would be more profitable if they went more in the direction of Google Adwords. That’s not a bad thing but you won’t get a lot of traffic if you don’t bid higher. While there are still a few marketplaces for fixed-price advertising, many of them don’t even compare to what Adbrite used to be. Therefore, the best alternative in my opinion is to find the publishers yourself. Especially if you want to advertise on a website that covers the exact niche you’re going for.
The first thing you need to consider is what types of websites you want to advertise on for your niche. Which ones do you think will deliver the most targeted traffic? In my opinion, the best ones to advertise on are ones that generate a huge amount of their traffic from the search engines. A lot of the websites that deliver targeted traffic from the search engines have lots of pages and content, This includes but is not limited to blogs, niche directories, and niche article directories. Remember, the websites you choose need to be in a niche and not just a general blog or directory.
Next, you need to figure out whether you want to advertise on their site using banner ads or text ads. I always liked banner ads when I used PPC because it always seemed to deliver better quality traffic. However, the fact that you’re paying a fixed price gives you the luxury of receiving some traffic that doesn’t convert to sales or sign-ups. If you choose text ads, then you probably won’t have a problem coming up with a catchy ad. However, if you choose banner ads you’ll probably have to hire somebody to create a catchy banner for you. I would recommend you go along with BannerMode.com since their work is high-quality and will give people a good impression of your business. Make sure it’s catchy and flashy since those banners usually get the most clicks. If you’re giving away something for FREE, use your banner to advertise that since the word “Free” always gets more people to click on your ads. You don’t want to sacrifice the quality of your traffic so make sure you’re giving away something that’s directly related to what you’re trying to sell.
Now that you’ve chosen which kind of websites you want to advertise on, and what your ad will look like, it’s time to find the websites you want to advertise on. If you want to advertise on blogs, you can probably join a blogging community or use a “blog search engine” to contact blog owners. For everything else, you can search Google or Yahoo. Depending on how much traffic you’re looking for, you might want to go along with websites that get a lower amount of traffic but still have an Alexa ranking of under 1,000,000. These webmasters will often give you a better deal since they receive less offers for advertising. Send them an email stating that you’re interested in advertising on their website and would like to know what the monthly or yearly cost would be. Ask them what spaces they have available and whether or not they would be willing to place your ad in a particular area. The closer to the top of the website your ad is, the more clicks you will usually get.
If you get a response from the webmaster with reasonable pricing, I would advise you to go along with their monthly plan for a single month to see how much traffic you can get from their website. Track all the visitors you receive from that website using a service like Google Analytics. If you’re paying $.10 or under per click then chances are you’re doing pretty good. If you have enough money in your ad budget, go ahead and upgrade to their yearly plan. Reasonable pricing for a yearly plan should be half the amount of a monthly plan if you calculate on a month-to-month basis. If their offer isn’t, try to negotiate with the webmaster to get a better deal. As always, make sure the website has been up long enough to where the webmaster won’t consider taking it down. Use a WHOIS site to check to see when their domain was registered and when it expires. You can also check archive.org to see if their website has been up for a while.
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