Free or Paid Advertising?

Greetings Internet Gurus!

I am trying to get a true feel for how effective FREE advertising has been for your business.

Please be honest...

Any dishonesty will skew the results and mislead readers.

Essential Question: What percentage of your advertising budget is FREE?

I make $9,000 a week and FREE forms of advertising makes up about 70% of my advertising budget.

My 30% paid advertising ratio consists of Traffic Generators (10%), Leads (10%) and Solo E-Zines Ads (10%).

As you see, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is not on my list. Word to the wise, be very careful when adding PPC advertising to your income arsenal. You could end up $30,000 in DEBT!

Thanks In Advance!

"You can be the person of your dream!" - God Bless
[Link removed - Admin]

Quoting: changemylifeGreetings Internet Gurus!

I am trying to get a true feel for how effective FREE advertising has been for your business.

Please be honest...

Any dishonesty will skew the results and mislead readers.

Essential Question: What percentage of your advertising budget is FREE?

I make $9,000 a week and FREE forms of advertising makes up about 70% of my advertising budget.

My 30% paid advertising ratio consists of Traffic Generators (10%), Leads (10%) and Solo E-Zines Ads (10%).

As you see, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is not on my list. Word to the wise, be very careful when adding PPC advertising to your income arsenal. You could end up $30,000 in DEBT!

Thanks In Advance!

"You can be the person of your dream!" - God Bless

$9,000 a week, eh? That's an impressive claim. So you make almost a $400,000 a year?

Okay, aside from your impressive claim, I don't spend much on advertising. Most of my advertising is free. I'd say that over 90% of it is free advertising.

If you don't mind my asking, how much daily or monthly traffic do you average? Do you have more than one site?



Newbie Shield

Sheesh! $9,000 dollars a week? Please enlighten us with how you are doing so. In response to your post, the vast majority of my advertising is free, i.e. blogging, article submittal, etc. I have yet to try paid methods yet because the ways I use to advertise work just fine. Good luck to you!

If you "really" made $9,000 a week, I doubt if you'd be even bother to post in this forum to recruit new members...

Most of my advertising is free. What product or service do you sell?

Hello GetAGrip,

I deal with naysayer all day! Go to my website and see for yourself. I do not do screen shots and other things that can be altered.

http://www.howifiredmyboss.net

By the way, the reason I can make $6,000 to $9,000 a week is because I do things that people don't. When you are sleeping I am marketing, building my list.

Here is a quote from an unknown source, "You have to do the things that people won't to have the things that people don't!" - Unknown

I manage roughly 7,000 to 8,000 leads DAILY! Over 250,000 leads per month. If you can't believe $9,000 a week you certainly can't believe what other people are making on my team.

By the way, I am far from the top earner! I am not even close!

If I may take a moment to bring your attention back to the Essential Question: What percentage of your advertising budget is FREE?

Where do I post:

Free Advertising - Craig's List (1000 post per day), Backpage.com (Paid repost Top Sponsor Ads), Gumtree (Diamond in the rough), AdlandPro (My secret weapon, the trick here is how you post. You must post on certain days.) and TrafficSwarm (Excellent traffic generator!)

Paid Advertising- Sorry guys that info is for paid team member only!

Hi,

Pretty impressive stats!, whether or not poeple believe you is not really an issue, you alone know the truth. What does interest me is why you are so against ppc. I know that there are many books claiming to beat the system but for me google is tops, where else can you create 20 differant ads using whatever keyword combination that you can think of and test them. All you need to do is set a modest budget of say $20 - $30 per month, the value is in studying your stats in the back office. I run google for my GRN business and have ad variations at an upper limit of approx 15c per click. Over time you can see how many clicks you get per impressions and this gives you a very good idea of which wording in your ads hits the spot. Keep refining the ads with slightly differant variations and in the end you get to the point where you know which lines work, the beauty is that you have to be creative because of the charactar number constraints. Once refined the successful wording can form the basis of your other advertising free or paid. $30 a month supplies world class market research.

BTW I do not have shares in Google

Maricel

Just started with Craigslist thanks to all of you!

Hi 2bwahm,

Congrats on your decision to jump in!

Here is a nugget.....

When posting to craigslist you must be creative. There must be something that separates your ads from the rest of the boring ads.

Here is an example:

If I am posting to New York or New Jersey my ad title may say something like: Bada Bing I Made $9,000 Last Week!

Do not use this ad title! WHY? If everyone uses the same ad title it will be FLAGGED and REMOVED!

This is just an example!

I take it to the next level and show my team members how to dominate Craigslist and post 1000 ads daily!

OK, I know that my post has nothing to do with advertising...but then again, maybe it does.

What I want to know is why do people list works like free, money, etc. like this FRE*E and mon.ey? Why the extra characters? I think I know why, but I don't want to show my ignorance by being wrong.

Thanks,

Mike

Hello Mike Pressnell,

This is a really good question. Once you learn this concept you can beat (get through) any SPAM filter.

Question: Why do Internet Marketers add additional characters to certain words like free and money?

Answer: All Internet Service Providers (ISP) to include corporate environments utilize a SMTP gateway with SPAM filtering. There are many types of SPAM filters, but what you need to know is how they flag an email as SPAM or a regular email.

The two primary ways SPAM filters flag emails are by running the email against a database or from heuristic learning.

SPAM databases are compiled from words or phrases that are generally found in most unsolicited emails. Some words are FREE, MONEY, GET RICH, MAKE MONEY, MAKE MONEY NOW etc.

Heuristic SPAM filters are learning SPAM filters. They flag emails based on what is deemed as normal and usual email behavior.

Most ISP and corporate environments utilize a SPAM database, because heuristic SPAM filters are known to log false positives. A false positive is a legit email that was flagged as SPAM.

Now... if most SPAM databases look for key words like FREE and MONEY. All I have to do is add an additional character like a ( . ) or a ( * ) and I have a whole new word that is not likely to be flagged by the SPAM filter. Here is an example: FREE ----> FRE*E or MONEY ----> M0N3Y.

I use this concept to ensure delivery of 98% of my emails during an email campaign.

I hope this helps!

Good Luck!

My ratio averages about 50% free/50% paid. People shouldn't hesitate to use PPC, but you really should take some type of adwords course so that you know what you're doing (or you could end up wasting a lot of advertising money).

Great believer in free advertising approx 85% of my business comes from free advertising using a mixture of blogs, article submission and social networking

Muchas Gracia, changemylife.

Now that explains why a lot of my legal emails have not been seen by my contacts.

I really do appreciate the info.

Mike Pressnell

I use mostly free advertising, article submission, social networking, exchanges, credit based safelist, just looking at craigslist now.

Thank you changemylife for that info on spam filters, never understood why I got emails with characters in the words.

Quoting: changemylifeHello Mike Pressnell,

This is a really good question. Once you learn this concept you can beat (get through) any SPAM filter.

Question: Why do Internet Marketers add additional characters to certain words like free and money?

Answer: All Internet Service Providers (ISP) to include corporate environments utilize a SMTP gateway with SPAM filtering. There are many types of SPAM filters, but what you need to know is how they flag an email as SPAM or a regular email.

The two primary ways SPAM filters flag emails are by running the email against a database or from heuristic learning.

SPAM databases are compiled from words or phrases that are generally found in most unsolicited emails. Some words are FREE, MONEY, GET RICH, MAKE MONEY, MAKE MONEY NOW etc.

Heuristic SPAM filters are learning SPAM filters. They flag emails based on what is deemed as normal and usual email behavior.

Most ISP and corporate environments utilize a SPAM database, because heuristic SPAM filters are known to log false positives. A false positive is a legit email that was flagged as SPAM.

Now... if most SPAM databases look for key words like FREE and MONEY. All I have to do is add an additional character like a ( . ) or a ( * ) and I have a whole new word that is not likely to be flagged by the SPAM filter. Here is an example: FREE ----> FRE*E or MONEY ----> M0N3Y.

I use this concept to ensure delivery of 98% of my emails during an email campaign.

I hope this helps!

Good Luck!


Great response to Mikes question!

This is why I like these forums: helpful, and friendly community.

Michael

$9000. a week. on free adversting!

Aplina,

All my sales did not come from free advertising. It was the result of paid advertising, free advertising and me teaching my team how to do what I do. Although many of their initial sales do come from free forms of advertising.

I liken free advertising to fishing. You may know how to fish, but do you know where to fish? Many Internet Marketers are casting their lines in the wrong place.

Craig's List is a excellent free site. Although, if you do not know where and how to post on Craig's List it will not yield the desired results.

Right before the Thanksgiving holiday I sat down and posted ads for a hour or so on Craig's List. I was able to generate 12 optins in that small amount of time and it did not cost me anything, nothing but my time.

Free Free Free.. refuse to pay for anything

Maybe bit more effort... but I like the fact that I am not paying out... although I do accept that to get things moving a bit faster.. may need to look into some paid ads.. ( or prune juice maybe? )

MyCats,

You are on it! Link Exchanges are an excellent way to increase your position in the organic searches of the Search Engines.

I am an avid user of Craig's List. If you are just getting started I recommend you take it slow. Over the last couple of months Craig's List has really stepped up their SPAM ad filtering.

Many people have become extremely frustrated because their ads are getting flagged and removed. When you are more familiar with Craig's List I would encourage you step up to an ad poster to get more ads out there.

In the mean time take it slow, monitor your ads and if they are flagged record what you did and don't did it again

One last thing, you should never post your primary domain to Craig's List. You should always use subdomains or PURLS to redirect to your primary domain. You do not want Craig's List to block your domain name.

Example: 123money.com -------- > yourdomainname.com

If you have a GoDaddy account you can easily create subdomains. Also, you can create PURLS just as easy!

Go here: http://purl.oclc.org/

-God Bless