If You Want To Get There Faster, You're Going To Have To Pay

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Copyright © 2011 Robert Dempsey


If you want to get further faster, you're going to have to open your wallet and use some paid options. There is something for everyone, and each method can suit practically every budget. But how do you know which will work best for you? Let's explore the options.

First though, a word of warning.

With a plethora of free marketing opportunities available including blogging and social media, it can be easy to get sucked into the "always free" mode of operating. And while free is great, it takes longer to see results, and sometimes you get what you pay for. So as you read this article keep in mind that you want to have free mixed in, but not be beholden to any single source of customers. And if you want to reach your goals faster, you've got to pay.

Having said that, let's take a look at the most popular options available today.

The Immaturity Of The Internet
Television is a mature media. There are channels that can reach every demographic everywhere in the world. It's highly segmented. Online marketing and advertising hasn't quite reached that point, but with the reach of the web and the large number of websites popping up on a daily basis, we're just about there.

Let's take a look at some of the most popular paid options available today.

Pay-Per-Click (And It's Relatives)
Google made a mint with those highly targeted text ads; it still does. If you've done your keyword research and have the language of your market, you can use pay-per-click (PPC) to validate niche markets and get highly targeted visitors to your website. But Google isn't the only game in town.

Yahoo!/Bing has a great PPC network which can also bring highly relevant visitors and might cost less than what you'd pay on Google. Advice here is to launch campaigns on both and see where you get the most bang for your buck, measured using the combination of a high click through rate (CTR) and low cost per click (CPC).

Pay per click has a lot of relatives too with varying rules and return on investment. A few are:

Cost Per Action (CPA)

Cost Per View (CPV)

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Paid Ad Placements
Paid ad placements come in a few forms. You can purchase banner advertisements on websites relevant to your products and services, as well as place graphic ads in email newsletters. A huge benefit of these placements is the demographic targeting. If you want to reach marketers you can do that; if you want to reach software developers you can do that; if you want to reach working mothers that have young children with acute health problems, you can do that too.

There are literally websites for every audience today, and many of those sites have email newsletters. Paid advertisements are one of the top ways website owners make money, so as a purchaser you can have your pick based on your budget.

Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs aren't "open your wallet" kind of things, however you are paying someone else to bring you customers. Affiliate marketing is a huge business, as evidenced by the laws enacted in many states to tax online purchases. Regardless, every business can take advantage of having an affiliate program, and many do.

Have you ever paid someone a "finder's fee" for referring you a customer? That's an informal affiliate program of sorts. Resellers are affiliates too - they sell a product someone else makes, and take care of a bulk of the marketing and sales.

So you might already have one of these programs in place, albeit an informal one.

Reasons To Go Paid
As mentioned in the beginning of this article, a major reason to open your wallet is to get to your goals faster. Free methods are free in terms of money, but not in time - they can take a long time to return a result, if they ever do.

As much as it sounds like an oxymoron, using methods like PPC can actually save you money and time. There are few better market validation strategies than setting up a survey and sending targeted, highly relevant visitors to it. You can find out if a market is worth your time or not, very quickly.

Long story short, don't discard paid strategies even if you think you can't afford them - it simply isn't true. Start your efforts small and go from there. In combination with the free methods, you'll be on your way to more leads and more customers.




About the Author:
Robert Dempsey is the Itinerant Entrepreneur. He combines technology, psychology, and marketing to help his clients build their empires using strategic marketing. Visit his website to start getting more traffic, leads, and sales: http://www.ItinerantEntrepreneur.com/.