This is the easier step, yet the step most people have trouble with it when it comes down to making actual money. Creating an excellent free report is A LOT harder than advertising your free report. It's just a matter of coming up with a list of good ezines and discussion boards to advertise on. Signature files are a surprise add-on here, but they really do work. You will need to generate a list of ezine publishers so you can send them articles to use for their ezine in order for it to make money online.
Ezine advertising would have to be my favourite option, as it's quick and easy. The only hard part is writing the ad copy for your ads, and finding ezines to advertise in. Two of the top ezine directories are topezineads.com and directoryofezines.com. There is a cost to use these, but they will be your lifeline until you generate a list of ezines yourself. The whole aim of this advertising campaign is to generate leads for your free report, so you really want to advertise anywhere you think people might be interested in your report. Since you’re not going for a direct sale straight off the bat, this somewhat allows you to be a little less worried about how targeted your audience is.
If you're running low on money, I recommend classified advertising as its one of the easiest ways to make money online. It's so inexpensive that I advertise Internet marketing products in humour ezines and still pull a good response rate for the amount of money I put in. You can get classified ads for around $2 per ad, which is extremely cheap.
I highly recommend Partneon.com and Twodollarads.com for any classified advertising you're going to do. Of course if you search through ezine directories you will find a lot of other places to advertise cheaply. Writing classified ads has turned into somewhat of an art form. There are literally hundreds of books on the subject of writing successful classified ads, yet most over complicate it too much.
So what makes a good classified ad?
An attention grabbing headline FREE REPORT SECRETS REVEALED HOW TO
A promise Become A Millionaire Overnight Earn $1200 In Two Weeks FREE REPORT: Secrets Of The Super Affiliates Revealed How To Become A Super Affiliate On A Tight Budget
A call to action For More Information Be Quick Or You Will Miss Out FREE REPORT: Secrets Of The Super Affiliates Revealed How To Become A Super Affiliate On A Tight Budget For More Information, Send A Blank Email To [email protected]
Once you've found a few good ezines, keep advertising with them. After you think you've got the most out of their classified ad section, start using sponsorship ads. While this will be quite a steep climb in costs compared to classified ads, the results will be quite dramatically different.
Top sponsorship ads can cost anywhere between $15 to $300 dollars depending on where you're advertising. I recommend using top sponsorship ads if you don't want to spend a lot extra on purchasing a solo ad. However if you can purchase a solo ad for an extra $50 or so, I would definitely go for the solo ad. Sponsorship ads also give you an idea of how well the ezine pulls and whether or not it's worth the time and money to buy a solo ad. Don't get carried away with figures when you purchase a solo ad. When I first started out, I advertised a product directly via my solo ad. The ad went out to 12,000 people and going on the figures of 1% buying my product, I thought this Internet Marketing thing wasn't that hard. I did my research, I was told this ezine was good, which it is, and I went for it.
The commission I was going to receive for every sale was $20. So 120 were supposed to buy, time $20 per sale came to $2400. How much money did I actually make from this ad? $20! That's right, I only made $20. Why? A) Because I advertised the affiliate program directly B) I did not know the affiliate program had been advertised about 10 times before C) I didn't even have a way to capture email addresses It was a total flop and I was very put off from trying again. That lasted about 4 hours! That night I was re-reading the information that got me into this mess to start with. I followed exactly what the affiliate program manager said to do, and it didn't work.
Luckily for me, at that time I stopped listening to affiliate managers and started thinking for myself in order to make money online. Have a look around any ezines you've joined, and try and remember if you read any of the ads. If so, which ones and why? Did you sign up for what they were offering? If no, Why? This is the best way to find ezine ads that work. If you read the ad and signed up for what they were offering, other people probably did, too. Another method of free advertising I like to use is discussion board posting.
Discussion board posting is very effective, especially if the message board is inside a members-only site where you pay to join. The idea here is not to spam the message board, but to actually add some content. Only answer questions you know a lot about. Don't try and be an expert on a topic you’re not. I'm not an expert at copywriting, so I very rarely give people expert advice on this. I help people with basic questions, but no more unless I really know what I'm talking about. This is the best way to ruin your reputation before you're even lucky enough to create one.
