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    Losing Money with Free Advertising

    “If I don’t invest any money in advertising, then I can’t lose money.” Actually you can! Today’s story tells you how, so that next time you won’t lose money again with free advertising. Now let’s get straight to the point and let me give you an example from the real world …

    A few years ago I joined a famous internet marketing forum (Warrior Forum). Since my niche is ezine advertising & ezine publishing, I set up a signature that included links to the places where I sell ad space in ezines.

    A secondary niche I activate in is SEO (search engine optimization) and in that forum there were much more threads on SEO than on ezine advertising. That’s why I started posting frequently on SEO sub-forum, teaching people what to do, starting debates, etc. A time consuming activity.

    What was the return in terms of clicks on the links from my signature? Close to zero. People from the SEO sub-forum were mainly interested in … SEO (not so unexpected, right?) That was UNTARGETED free advertising (The action of promoting your product to an audience whose main interest is not in the same niche as your product is called untargeted advertising.)

    Seeing the poor result, I decided to post only on threads related to ezine advertising and newsletter publishing.

    Guess what? Each time I posted something, at least a few users clicked on my links. Why? They read that thread because they were interested in ezines and my links were exactly what they were looking for.

    Now I spend less time on that forum but my results are much better. Instead of spending the rest of the time on SEO sub-forum and getting in return a big thank you and nothing more, I can focus on other marketing activities that may help ME and MY business.

    Do the same and forget about untargeted advertising, even if it’s free. You may not pay money, but you waste your time, which is actually money… Untargeted advertising is a waste of time and money, whether it’s free or paid, whether it’s forum marketing, article marketing or any other type of marketing.

    To Your Success!
    Adrian Jock

    P.S. For more tips on internet marketing, subscribe to my free newsletter and follow me on Twitter.

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    This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Free Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    4 Responses to “Losing Money with Free Advertising”

    1. Linda Stacy says:
      September 1, 2009 at 12:40 pm

      This article illuminates one often overlooked key to successful marketing – tracking. If you don’t know how many clicks your forum signature gets, you don’t know whether it’s worth it or not. I think too many people use valuable time posting free advertising without ever knowing what type of return they’re getting.

    2. admin says:
      September 1, 2009 at 12:55 pm

      You’re perfectly right, Linda.

      Advertising without tracking the results = blind advertising = waste of money (and/or waste of time which actually is loss of income = again waste of money)

    3. Jeremy @ Metal Briefcase says:
      September 3, 2009 at 11:08 pm

      In my opinion, I think it may be rash to say that untargeted advertising is a waste of time. That may be true if all you are interested in is direct traffic. Anytime you are building links to your site, you are potentially helping search engine rankings. Also those links will stay up on those sites indefinitely. So someone might find one of your posts years later and still click thru. Plus you are helping build a brand by getting your company/website name in front of lots of people.

      Sure tracking helps, but it is not always necessary. Sometimes you just know that certain marketing efforts will pay off. It isn’t even always possible to measure the benefits of some marketing.

    4. admin says:
      September 4, 2009 at 4:56 am

      You’re wrong, Jeremy.

      Poor quality backlinks don’t help too much your search engine rankings. Search engines are not dumb but quite clever.

      Example of poor quality backlink: a link to a cars website placed on a health website. Search engines don’t value too much unrelated links. Example of good quality backlink: a link to a cars website placed on Mercedes website.

      As Google staff explained many times (Matt Cutts did it last time a few weeks ago), the backlinks are like votes but not all votes are equal. A vote from a related website is valuable. A vote from an unrelated website is almost worthless. The CONTEXT matters a lot. Placing tons of links everywhere, on unrelated websites is a waste of time. I recommend you to listen to Matt Cutts lecture on SEO @ WordCamp San Francisco 2009.

      Untargeted advertising IS a waste of time from both perspectives: direct traffic and backlinks. When you’ll learn more about internet marketing & SEO, you’ll understand it.

      One single backlink from a related website may value more than tens of backlinks from unrelated websites. To get the tens of backlinks you spent time, and that was a WASTE of TIME (instead of writing ONE comment, you wrote TENS of comments) – that’s poor time management ;-)

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