That’s a big promise: the chance to find a marketplace filled with hungry buyers, people with money to spend and eager to purchase whatever you are promoting.
I’ve looked at numerous ways to find massive markets, over the years, markets comprising people keen to visit your websites and blogs, and (most importantly) keen to make a purchase or click on a commission-generating link at your site.
There are many places to find massive markets, and countless very different ways to target those markets, for free or at very low cost.
How to find a market full of hungry buyers…
Let me give you a few places to target and a couple of ideas for making money from those markets…
* Article Directories are my personal preference. The secret to successfully marketing in article directories is to opt for what are known as ‘High Page Rank’ directories, meaning that they rank highly in search engine returns, and consequently give your contributions high placement when someone searches online for the subjects or products featured in your articles.
Here are a few places to begin uploading your promotional articles:
– Ezine Articles – www.ezinearticles.com – from personal experience I get many more visitors to my own websites from articles at Ezine Articles than from any other article directory.
– Helium – www.helium.com – at Helium the site gives contributors token payment based on the number of people reading their articles, which rises exponentially as visitor numbers grow over the short and longer term.
– Articles Base – www.articlesbase.com – not as good in terms of driving traffic as Ezine Articles but a good place to generate backlinks for your websites and blogs. A backlink is basically an active link in the article that leads back to your own websites, and can benefit your sites’ placement in search engine returns.
* Post in blogs and forums which basically means writing short messages, called ‘posts’ or ‘postings’, relating to your own or other people’s blogs and forums. Like article directories, the objective is to siphon off traffic from your postings direct to your own websites, and to generate backlinks to help your site rise higher in search engine returns.
You can also sell direct from your postings by linking them to sales pages for your own or for affiliate product. There are millions of blogs and forums online but not all of them are suitable for driving traffic or growing worthwhile backlinks to your sites, so you need to avoid posting on sites with a low PageRank or with very small membership numbers. Instead post on high traffic, high PageRank sites, such as:
– Blogger – www.blogger.com – open a blog at blogger.com, the site belongs to Google, and it costs nothing to build as many blogs as you like. And because they own the site, Google tends to give their own blogs preference to other company’s free blogs in search engine returns.
2 tips for helping blogs (Blogger-based or not) rank higher in search engine returns:
1. After each posting you create, go to www.ping.fm and upload it to more than thirty blogging platforms.
2. ‘Ping’ your blog entries at www.pingomatic.com – it means showcasing your latest blog entries to search engines.
– Warrior Forum – www.warriorforum.com – probably the world’s most visited forum, specialising in Internet marketing, and a great place to promote your own products to help fellow ‘Warriors’ succeed online, as well as for growing backlinks to your sites.
* Post Free Advertisements for your own products and others you are promoting as an affiliate. Include an active link at the end of the advertisement, to take visitors direct to your promotional sites as well as growing backlinks.
Important: most free ads are temporary and will disappear from the site after a specified period, so backlinks have limited benefit. However, some sites allow the same advertisement to be renewed without first being removed from the site, so offering long-term value from every backlink. Make that happen by keeping a note of final listing dates and refresh your ads before your backlinks are broken.
Try the following sites for your free ads:
– US Freeads – www.usfreeads.com – apparently the most effective free advertising site in terms of search engine placement, visitor numbers, backlink potential. Advertisers can pay a small sum for more prominent placement at the site.
– Craigslist – www.craigslist.org – some marketers prefer Craigslist to US Freeads., so try both and see which works best for you.
For cost free advertising outside the United States, key something like ‘free + advertising + UK (or other country)’ into the search box at google.com
Finally, call back regularly to identify more free and low cost mass-market audiences for your promotions.