Marketing

You basically have two choices for marketing an AdSense website: free marketing, or paid marketing. Free marketing follows the same rules as any other site - only use the effective types of marketing, forget the time wasters.

Good Free Marketing:

1. Article Marketing. It's viral, it helps your credibility, it targets interested visitors, and distribution channels are already in place.

2. Link trades. Don't make a fuss over trying to get these, just look for logical opportunities in the course of business. They'll come without having to hunt for them, and they'll be better quality this way.

3. Directory Listings. NOT the same thing as FFA or Free Classifieds! Directories have screened listings, usually there is a real person maintaining quality standards.

4. Post to forums and blogs. DO NOT SPAM them! Just participate in a meaningful way, and drop a signature line.

5. Use your signature line everywhere you go. It's your online business card.

6. Network with other people. Do NOT just network with other business owners, unless you are marketing business products. Find a way to connect personally with people who are interested in what you have.

Bad Free Marketing - Just the dozen most obvious:

1. Free Classifieds/FFA Submitting – Free Classified sites and Free For All Link sites won't do you any good. Your information won't stay there long enough to benefit you, nobody who wants what you have is looking for it there, and search engines won't pick up your link there. You will get lots of spam from it though. Free directories are a different thing, and have a real human approving all the listings, so they are not included in this category.

2. Traffic Exchanges – If you are madly clicking away on someone else's site, just so you can rack up points to get someone else to click on your site, what makes you think anyone clicking wants what you have? Traffic and income are not the same thing. These do NOT help your search engine rank, and they do not help you get customers or ad clickthroughs, so they are a waste of time that you could spend doing something that does work.

3. List Building Programs – In order to benefit from these, you have to promote the list. If you can do that successfully, you can promote your list directly, and more successfully. Prospects from these programs are also not high quality prospects.

4. Safelists – Same issue as traffic exchanges. People are there to SELL, not to buy. Your email gets deleted without being read, and you wasted your time writing it and sending it, and you wasted all that time you'll have to spend emptying your inbox.

5. Massive Link Trades – Links are only valuable if they are from good quality sites with something in common with your site. Trade with the wrong sites, and it can get your site banned if that site has been banned. Low pagerank is not a problem... Bad quality sites are.

6. Repeat Search Engine Submits – Once your site has been submitted, it gets rechecked by the search engines on a regular basis. Resubmitting is a waste of time, and can get you banned by the search engines for spamming them.

7. Submit All Pages to Search Engines – Submit JUST the home page. Any more than that is a waste of your time, and can be seen as spamming the search engines. The search engines will follow the links from your home page to all the other pages in your site.

8. SEO Black Hat Tactics – Anything you do to trick the search engines into giving you inaccurate or undeserved rankings is considered black hat. It will get you banned, and that would not help you get traffic at all!

9. Advertising on Forums – Participating in forums is a GOOD marketing tactic. Spamming them is bad. You have to be a real person, offer helpful information, and do more than just post an ad. Ads are forbidden on some forums – follow the rules. Most forums allow a signature link though, and if people like you, and think you have good sense and intelligence, they'll click the link.

10. Fast, Free Solutions – Anything advertised as “fast and free” is a scam. No exceptions, no equivocation. If its free, its slow (may be very powerful, but takes time to grow). If its fast, its costly.

11. MiniSites in Free Webspace – Some people say you can build a mini-site and stick it in free space, and link it back to your main site to get more traffic. Forget it. Search engines now check site ownership, and all you did is give yourself more things to promote, since new websites have no linking power for pagerank. Building all those sites is time consuming. In the time it takes for you to register an account with a free hosting service, you can post two high quality links to niche directories. In the time it takes to build one mini-site completely, you can get 10 high quality links and add a couple of pages of good quality content to your main site. Why waste your time getting fragmented? Focus on the real issue, which is promoting your site and updating it.

12. Fishing with the Wrong Bait - You have to target your market. You have to speak TO them, and you have to use marketing that gets the message to them where they already are! Otherwise, you'll catch something other than what you want - and you WANT, a nice hungry customer!

If you use the right free tactics, you can avoid the necessity to pay for advertising, but if you do, it will be slower. For people who cannot afford an ad budget but who have plenty of energy though, knowing the right things can really help.

There is a separate list of dos and don'ts for Paid Advertising. I'll not tell you all the ways that you can waste your money, you can find that on Badmarketingideas.com. What I WILL tell you, is how to know what is a valid risk, and what is not!

Ok, AdSense sites are not like product sales sites where ads are concerned. With a product sales site, you get hundred's of visitors, you get a few orders, which make you dollars.

With an Ad supported site, you get hundreds of visitors, a few clickthroughs, and you make pennies. It takes a lot more traffic to make good money. This is just how it works.

You can access your stats from Google, which tell you how much you are making. Take the number of visitors to your site (From your site stats - this is NOT the same as the Ad impression number in Google's tracking), and divide your earnings by the number of visitors. This will give you a "cents per visitor" number.

Remember the cost you get paid per click is MEANINGLESS in this calculation. What you need to know is how many visitors it takes to earn so much, or how much each visitor is worth to you. If a visitor is worth less than $.05, then you will NOT be able to afford Pay Per Click. Here is why:

When visitors come to your site, only a few of them click on the ads. So you have to average out the total earnings with the total visitors. But with pay per click, you pay for EVERY visitor. And most clicks cost way more than $.05, but that is the minimum they are going to cost you.

You can use many strategies, and many people recommend Paid Inclusion. Tracking it is different. You have to take the increase in traffic from the time you start it, and divide your increase in earnings by your increase in traffic. Compare that with the amount per month that you pay for the inclusion. If it is worth it, or if it is showing a growth trend, then keep it. Otherwise, ditch it.

If you use paid advertising, you MUST analyze, and you have to do the math! Otherwise you'll open up a great sucking hole in your budget, and your site will fail to earn.

Normally, traffic to an ad supported site will gradually gain and grow over time, so watch the trends, not just the monthly numbers. As long as it is growing, it is worth it, and you can keep adding pages and new sites.

The rule is the same as for any business strategies: Do more of what works, and less of what doesn't. Once you have a track record, you should be able to pinpoint what it is that works, and improve it to work better.