WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, we will cover the preparation required for placing free ads
on the Internet. We touched on some of the free advertising strategies is Lessons
4 and 5 of this online course. In this lesson, we will take a more in-depth
look. In our next lesson, we will discuss in more detail the process of finding
effective places to advertise.

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FREE ADVERTISING DOES WORK

People come to Affiliate Marketing from many different circumstances. While
the fortunate have substantial money to invest in building their new business,
some have no money to invest at all. (I recall one SFI affiliate from the SFI
Discussion Board who was homeless. He would go to the public library to access
the Internet everyday in order to work his SFI business.)

As with all things, the more you have to invest, the easier and quicker it will
be for you to build your business. But, affiliate marketing, especially with
the SFI Marketing Group, can be done successfully without any financial investment,
if you must approach it that way.

Even if you do have money to invest in paid advertising, you should learn the
ropes of free advertising. The learning experience is valuable and will help
you be more efficient with paid advertising. Also, learning the ropes of free
advertising will enable you to teach your team members who do not have money
to invest in advertising.

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FOUR ELEMENTS OF AN ONLINE ADVERTISING
STRATEGY

Online advertising strategy involves four elements. You need an ad. You need
a URL (Website address) or an e-mail address to which the ad will point. You
need to be prepared for the posting process. And, you need a location to place
the ad.

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PICKING YOUR AD

SFI Affiliates can obtain approved ads from the Marketing Aids link on the
SFI Resource Center site (http://www.sfimg.com).
You should use only these approved ads if they are pointing directly to your
SFI Gateways or if your ads mention SFI by name. If your ads are pointing to
your own Website and do not mention SFI, you are free to create your own ads.

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POINTING YOUR AD

With respect to the URL to which your ads will point, all SFI Affiliates are
furnished several Gateway sites upon signing up for SFI. A few of the gateways
are used to sign up new affiliates on your team. Others are for selling specific
SFI products and services. For example, at the time of this writing, the "SIM"
and "FREE" gateways are used to sign up new affiliates. The "GD"
gateway is used to sell the domain name registration service. The "LD"
gateway is used to sell SFI's long distance service. The "ISP" gateway
is used to sell dial-up Internet access service. The "IAHBE" gateway
is used to sell memberships to the International Association of Home Business
Entrepreneurs. And there are others.

If allowed at the location where you place your ads, your ads can point directly
to these furnished gateway URLs. Many of the ad sites, however, ban the large
affiliate programs such as SFI (due to sheer volume), and you will need to have
your own Website or doorway page for the ad to point to. (You then put the gateway
links are on your own site and people who respond to your ad can access them
there.)

The other possibility is to use an e-mail address in an ad, rather than have
the ad point to a Website. Many people suggest that using an "autoresponder"
e-mail as the pointer in your ad is the most effective way to go.

You should not just use an ordinary e-mail address, however. Most of your responses
to an e-mail address in an ad will be insincere. It is very common, when you
use free advertising, to receive numerous e-mail responses to the effect of
"I saw your add and see that you are interested in making extra income.
I would like to talk to you about that." Such responses are nothing more
than someone trying to get you to join their program. These e-mails, which are
automatically generated, really are not interested in information about your
program. Thus, your ad needs to point to a Website where the serious responders
can sign up immediately or to an autoresponder that will automatically send
them further e-mails pointing to your URL. Otherwise, you would have to work
your way through all those e-mails to find those who are serious and then point
them to your gateway manually.

The argument for pointing to an autoresponding e-mail rather than a Website
URL in your ad is based upon the fact that many people will not sign up on the
first encounter with anything. People need time to mull it over in the back
of their minds. Some studies suggest that it takes seven to 11 contacts before
most people will commit to anything online. Setting up an autoresponder to send
out seven to 12 messages over time increases the odds that someone will sign
up.

In my opinion, it is better to have your ad point to your own Website and then
let the Website have a sign-up form for further contact--i.e. a newsletter or
e-mail series--than to use an autoresponder in your ad. This reduces the odds
of spam complaints and is a bit more professional manner of creating the additional
contacts needed to achieve the signups. (I can't help but envision these autoresponding
e-mails still triggering each other and still trying to convince each other
to sign up for something long after the humans who set them up are dead and
gone.) The more personal your communications, the more effective they will be.

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PREPARING FOR THE POSTING PROCESS

Secondary E-Mail Address

Whether your ad is designed to point to a URL or an e-mail address (autoresponder
or not), all ad locations will require that you submit an e-mail address to
the site host in order to post an ad. It is absolutely essential to obtain a
secondary (often called "throwaway") e-mail address for this purpose.
Posting ads will result in your e-mail getting farmed by the spammers and you
will receive tons of spam. Do not expose your primary e-mail address to this!
You can acquire e-mail accounts fairly easily these days from your ISP or from
one of the free e-mail services, such as Yahoo! or Hotmail. You have to give
an e-mail address to post ads anywhere, so create a new e-mail account just
for this purpose.

Physical Address And Phone Number

Many sites also require you to give an address and phone number. Although these
are "required fields" in the form to post the ad, many people get
away with just typing "N/A" or similar text in these fields. There
are ethical issues here that you will have to resolve for yourself. The ad posting
service is being provided in exchange for your information. In a real sense,
you become a lead for the host site. It would not be ethical to provide false
information to acquire the service. Some people even set up secondary post office
addresses and phone numbers (like the secondary e-mail) to avoid this ethical
problem. Others do provide their primary contact information and deal with any
resulting telemarketing or junk snail mail as it arrives.

Tracking System

Also essential is to set up a tracking system. Tracking is crucial. Without
it, you do not know which sites are working and which are a waste of time.
At a minimum, each ad you place should have a tracking code in it that
exclusively identifies the location you placed the ad. With some tracking
systems, you can also code for the specific ad used, the date and time
you placed the ad, and other variables. SFI provides keycoding to track
your ads. The keycode consists of numbers, which you choose and place,
preceded by a period, after your SFI ID in the SFI gateway URL you use
in the ad. You will need to set up your own system of matching keycodes
with locations. Be sure to record a keycode for each ad you place. Start
a list of keycodes and the corresponding ad locations and keep the list
safe and handy.

For each advertising campaign, you will need to pick the gateway or Website
that will be the target of your ad. Then you will need to pick the ad you will
be using. Then you are off to find some places to post the ad. For each place
you post, remember to keycode the ad's URL and record the location of your ad
on your keycode list.

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PREPARING YOURSELF FOR THE QUEST FOR AD
SITES

The big issue is where to place the ads.

Do not think of this issue as being one of acquiring a list of Websites from
someone or someplace and then placing your ads on those Websites. It doesn't
work that way, and I will explain why in a moment. Instead, you must think of
it as a process. While others can't tell you where to place the ads, they can
teach you the process of finding sites on which to place your ads.

Let me make an analogy. Let's say that you are in a group of 15 people who
are going blackberry picking. The field that you go to has more than enough
blackberries for everyone. But, the bushes are spread out over a large area
and each has only a few blackberries on it. It would make sense for everyone
to spread out with much distance between each person and each go from bush to
bush in their area picking the blackberries. What would not make sense would
be for everyone to stay clumped in a group and, as soon as anyone found a bush,
all 15 try to pick from the same bush at the same time. Only the first two of
three people would get any blackberries and the other 12 or so people would
only serve to be in the way and to stomp down the nearby bushes before anyone
could pick from them.

In a way, many of the Websites that accept free ads and are effective are like
those blackberry bushes. They have a limited capacity to produce results. They
only work for anyone because everyone is not posting there. No matter how unselfish
affiliates who have found effective advertising sites may be, it is not in anyone's
interest to publish the site on a list somewhere for all to use. That usually
only serves to kill the sites effectiveness for everyone.

So, your task is to learn the process to use to continuously find new and effective
advertising sites. Some sites, while very effective at first, have a limited
audience and thus a limited capacity to produce results for your ad. You will
likely need to move from site to site as the sites' capacities are exhausted.

The Internet is vast and constantly changing. New sites crop up all the time
to replace the old ones as they lose their effectiveness. Thus, the process
of searching for places to place your ads is a continuing process. Fortunately,
it is also a very interesting and exciting process.

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CONCLUSION

Free online advertising can work for affiliate marketers provided they are
properly prepared and approach the process in the right way. To be prepared,
you need to have an effective ad, you need a target URL to which the ad will
point, and you need to be prepared for the posting process. This includes having
a secondary e-mail account and a tracking system in place. Finally, you need
to understand the process of finding effective locations to place your ads.

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WHAT'S COMING NEXT

In our next lesson, we will discuss in more detail the process of finding
effective free ad sites. In the meantime, it would be helpful for you
to review lesson seven of this course, which introduces you to some of
the concepts we will be addressing.

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by George Little

Copyright (year) Panhandle On-Line, Inc.

License granted to Carson Services, Inc. for distribution to SFI affiliates.
No part of this work may be republished, redistributed, or sold without
written permission of the author.