Internet Advertising Costs: Time Vs. Money

Internet Advertising Costs: Time Vs. Money

No matter how you break it down, internet advertising costs. Any type of advertising costs. But one major advantage of advertising online is that certain methods allow you to pay in time rather than in cash. There are pros and cons to all types of internet advertising. what will work for you depends on the product/service you are promoting, the demographics of who you are promoting it to and your time and budget allowances.

Let’s start with the free forms of advertising online. Luckily, there are many of these: article marketing, online classified advertising, safelists, traffic exchanges, relevant forums and, of course, the all-powerful social networking sites. Article marketing may be the most time consuming as you need to consistently create and distribute quality articles about how your products/services can benefit your target market. But your efforts do accumulate over time to bring in visitors to your website and buyers of whatever it is you are offering.

There are many online classified sites. Most of them offer free sign-ups and the opportunity to upgrade to a relatively low-cost monthly membership if you want to create more sophisticated ads than what the free service will allow you to do. When you join a safelist, you can send out promotional emails to the other members of the safelist. How many emails you are allowed to send out depends on how many emails you read, because other members are also sending you emails. With safelists you also have the opportunity to upgrade so that you can send emails without clicking to earn credits.

Traffic exchanges work in a similar way. You earn credits by looking at other people’s advertisements and, in turn, you can place your advertisement for others to see. Like with safelists, you can upgrade and choose to pay instead of spend time clicking for credits. Forums and social networking sites are simply free and represent an online means of networking. To be effective in this area, you definitely need to keep things social. You should not be doing any direct overly promotional advertising. Just let people know that you are out there and what you do.

Of course internet advertising costs can be monetary as well. Some of the methods that you can pay for are PPC (pay per click) advertising, ezine advertising and banner advertising on other websites. How much you spend on these types of advertising will vary greatly.

Basically, you spend what you want to or what you can afford. with PPC, how much you spend depends on how much you bid on certain keywords. With ezine advertising, you will send out ads or promotional emails to the ezine’s subscriber list. How much you spend depends on how big the list is, the frequency of the publication, and other factors. Do enough research to make sure that you are choosing an ezine that is right for your niche.

Advertising on other related sites that are higher ranked than yours is another good tactic. It gets you traffic and links back to your site which will improve your own site ranking and sales. As you can see, internet advertising costs vary greatly.