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TradeBay Categories
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on November 13th, 2009
We’re pleased to announce the following new categories for TradeBay.se!
TradeBay subpages
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on October 21st, 2009
How To Make Money Using Twitter
Posted by BobZ in Uncategorized on July 28th, 2009
Twitter is a social networking platform that lets people share ideas and information with each other using a micro-blog platform. Basically you can only write one or two sentences and share it with your followers. Even though Twitter is immensely popular, it’s still relatively new and a gold mine for any type of internet marketer or online entrepreneur.
The Method
There are several ways to do this, but I’ll outline the one which I feel is the most effective.
- Find affiliate programs with high revenue. CPA works best, but depending on the amount of followers you have you can opt to have CPC as well.
- Create a twitter profile relevant to the affiliate programs you joined.
- Post tweets with affiliate URL’s
- Post normal tweets with news relevant to your niche so it’s not so spammy with affiliate URL’s
- Buy and Auto-follower and let the program accumulate followers for you.
This is a very simple method but can be highly effective. It’s also very easy to do and not time consuming at all so the money generated from this can be worth your time. Remember not to make your tweets too spammy with affiliate URL’s as people will catch on and stop following you. Happy Tweeting!
Social Media Marketing – What’s the hype?
Posted by BobZ in Uncategorized, Web Design on June 7th, 2009
Firstly, I think it’s important to point out that social media are websites or platforms where people connect with other people. It’s really that simple.
There is now a hype surrounding social media marketing and everybody is trying to get on board. Companies have shrunk their budget and are looking on focusing on the cheaper social media marketing. Is social media marketing more effective than any of the other established methods of internet marketing? No one really knows yet. Here are the things that social media can do for you though:
1) Build a Brand – It lets you connect with individuals all day every day that may be interested in your company/website. You can share interesting info/content to targeted people more and more so you build your name, image, and reputation.
2) Create Buzz – With interesting content and connecting with relevant or interested people, you can people to talk and make your company go viral.
3) Connect with customers like never before – Show another side to your business and connect on a more personal level. Build a rapport with your customers and get good feedback from them.
4) Control the message you want to send out, no mass media skewing or 3rd parties distorting the message. You have the ability to communicate on a 1-on-1 basis.
5) No cost really involved. Sure, it can be time consuming but worth every minute.
6) Brand awareness can mean sales down the road through other channels.
So in my humble opinion social media marketing does work and is very important in your overall marketing strategy. Should it be your only source or marketing channel? No. But tying it in with SEO, search engine marketing, banner advertising, video advertising, forums, and other tactics is important and can be very effective.
The forecast for advertising worldwide is a gloomy one but good news for online advertising
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on April 16th, 2009
Worldwide advertising spending is expected to fall by 6.9% this year to $453bn (£304bn) this year.
The decline has been put down to the current economic problems, which it said had both hit corporate confidence and put consumers off making major buys.
newspapers are expected suffer most, with advertising revenues down 12%, as people turned to the internet.
The internet would be the only medium to attract higher advertising spending.
It’s predicted that television would boost its proportion of advertising budgets to 38.6% from 38.1%, but the total spent on TV advertising would fall by 5.5%.
It’s also predicted that spending on internet advertising is set to rise 8.6% as shoppers hunt online bargains.
Earlier this month online monitoring firm Hitwise found that visits to classified advertising websites were booming, with visits to such sites in the US up 84% on the same time last year.
Newspapers have been particularly hit by the downturn, from smaller titles in the UK to large papers in the US.
In February, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation announced a $6.4bn quarterly loss, as falling advertising revenues forced it to cut $8.4bn from the value of assets.
Monetizing your traffic as a small publisher
Posted by BobZ in Banner Advertising, Uncategorized on April 6th, 2009
So you are a new publisher trying to get your site off the ground. You’re doing some different stuff to get more and more traffic to your site. But what now? How do you start making money from your website?
Let’s start this by exploring the most common way – Banner Advertising
Most sites have banner advertising on the top or sides of the page. Most banner ad deals are set up as CPM (Cost per Thousand), CPC (Cost per Click), or CPA (Cost per sale). Which one is best? Well, on CPM as a publisher, you don’t take any risks on how the banner advertisment will perform on your page and you get paid simply by the amount of exposures you deliver. On CPC, you take a small risk as you’re banking on the banner getting a high CTR (click through rate) to acheive good results and make some money. On CPA, you’re taking a 100% risk as you’ll only receive compensation when your visitors click on the banner, and make a transaction on the advertisers site. Many publishers cringe at the thought of giving advertisers “free” advertising on their sites. But as we know, the larger the risk often means the higher reward as well.
For example, I’ll give you a real life example. I was running a CPM campaign for a poker advertiser at $ 0.80 CPM. The advertiser insisted we should try CPA instead of CPM and offered $150 CPA. Like most publishers, I didn’t want to take any risk and went for the risk-free CPM of $0.80. They ran 10 million impressions worth and costed them $8,000. The campaign was highly targeted to their core audience with good promotions and strategy in place, so the campaign delivered very well for the poker advertiser. In fact, we managed the campaign so well that 92 players signed up and deposited funds to play poker with them. If we would have gone with the CPA deal, that would have been worth $13,800 instead of the $8,000 we got from CPM.
So as you can see, things are never clearly pointing to CPM as a publisher. If you offer quality traffic that matches the advertisers target market, you stand a good chance of seriously profiting from CPA. Of course with CPA, the advertiser has to also offer a quality product that is supported by nice banners, good promotions, and an effective landing page to drive conversions.
Remember, test out a variety of CPM, CPA, and CPC campaigns with different advertisers to see which ones offer you the best eCPM rate.
Please click here if you’re a publisher and would like to monetize your traffic more effectively.
Using Facebook to drive traffic
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on March 18th, 2009
This is something that is relatively new for me, and I’ve only been playing around with this for a short time. But I do have some useful tips on how you can use facebook to drive traffic.
1) Create a Group that is interesting and engaging.
Create a group that is somehow relative to your website, and make it interesting and engaging to entice people to join your group. You can do this by uploading videos, photos, links to other sites, quality information on the topic of the group, and asking for the group members to put in THEIR input on whatever the group topics are about. This way the group is actually serving a purpose and meaningful for the group members to stay in touch often.
2) Invite everyone you know with interest in this group to join
3) Tell every member to invite everyone they know who would be interested, and so on and so on.
4) Assuming your group gets a lot of members to join, you may very well have 50,000 members you can reach out to very easily whenever you want. You can engage these people with new content on the group page or simply send a bulk email to all group members to visit your site. This is potentially 50,000 worth of QUALITY visitors to your site very easily and for free. The key is to offer something unique and MEANINGFUL to the member so they keep coming back, the same as you would your regular website.
That’s all for now. I’ll dig deeper on Facebook on the next blog. But for now, this is something straight forward and simple 
Taking advantage of the economic downturn
Posted by admin in Banner Advertising, Uncategorized on March 9th, 2009
For the most part, the economic downturn has had an effect that can be felt deeply all over the world by pretty much everybody. Many large companies have seen their profits and shares fall significantly and are in a lot of trouble, or are already bankrupt. This naturally means those huge advertising budgets they once had no longer exist. So in turn, many online publishers have alot of unsold inventory left over and have seen their profits also fall.
So how can this help the small and medium sized businesses who want to advertise online?
For one, this means you can deffinitaly get cheaper prices than you did before to advertise online. Cheaper prices can obviously help you either get more exposure for the same amount of money, or help you hit a positve ROI. Also to be more specific, you can get cheaper prices on LARGE sites you simply couldn’t afford to advertise on before. These massive publishers who used to charge $10.00 CPM have seen their largest advertisers pull out (GM, FORD, CITIBANK, etc) so they have alot of remnant inventory now. That $10.00 CPM is now over half the amount it was and you can capitilize on it.
Secondly, you need to understand that in these trying times people want more value for their buck. You need to offer people some good bargains. When people visit your site, they need to feel that is was worth their time. Whether its simply offering better prices for products or just an informative site that can help them get through the recession, it will work. Maybe a free site that just entertains them and gets their minds of their current problems could also work.
As an online company just remember to be unique. Offer something of real substance and quality and things will work out in the end.
If you’re interested in advertising on some premium websites at highly competitive rates, or need consulting on how to market your business online effectively, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
Banner Advertising Vs. Search Engine Marketing
Posted by BobZ in Banner Advertising, Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized on January 9th, 2009
So where should you spend your hard earned marketing budget? When you are deciding your online advertising budget, one of the most important questions you need to consider is what type of online advertising to purchase. Banner advertising on other popular websites or being a top hit on search engines when people search for your offerings? Both have their strengths and weaknesses and we’ll explore both.
Banner advertising is in a sense a more traditional way to advertise and traditionally associated with CPM (Cost Per Thousand). You are attempting to promote your product to the general public or your niche target market. You want them to know you exist, and at the same time entice them to be a customer. This in a nutshell is how print and TV advertising works. You are the one actively trying to pursue the customer and make a connection.
PPC (Pay Per Click advertising) / Search Engine Marketing is the total opposite. It is the customer who is actively pursuing information or your offering, and it where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an advertisement to visit the advertisers’ website So it is your job to bid on keyword phrases relevant to your target market to make sure you’re easily found when they make those searches.
It is very important to note the behavioural differences between these two forms of advertising. Banner advertising on other websites can be viewed as evasive to the user, and tend to be ignored. When a user is surfing a site for information, they are focused on that only and are unlikely to pay attention to your banner because of their current state of mind.
In PPC Search Engine Marketing, the same user is actively searching for information on Google for instance. They are much more likely to click on your link because of their current state of mind. Instead of you trying to get their attention while they’re doing something else on another site, you’re being available and accessible when they’re ready. The chances of making a successful sale is much higher on search engine marketing simply because of the behavioural difference. On the down side PPC takes a lot more management and supervision and also some important keyword phrases could be well out of your price range e.g $50+ meaning you could be forced to opt for the more generic and less viewed keywords.
It’s also important determine what your goals are of an advertising campaign and what you are actually marketing. PPC Search Engine Marketing is more effective. The reason is because the traffic is generally very targeted and the users are in a better state of mind to make a purchase. But banner advertising gives you the ability to reach out the masses and make them aware of your offering. You can grab their attention and entice them to make a purchase which is still very important.
For example, if you have a very targeted niche market and there are popular websites out there who’s readers are this exact market, it is very important to reach out to them. It cannot be overlooked how important and effective it is to banner advertise on these sites. It is very likely that you can turn these people into customers and create some strong branding exposure.
Conclusion
In the end there is no true winner or loser here as neither PPC or Banners Ads can guarantee conversions. This will boil down to your web content, web design, products and service you offer.
Try and think about what your end goals are. If you are looking for targeted and instant visitors to your site go for PPC Serach Engine Marketing.
If you are trying to build branding value then go for Banner Advertising.