Do You Understand How Online Advertising Works?
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A few months ago the very first person approached me wanting to advertise a certain affiliate program on my blog. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the program in question would go on to become probably the most advertised program I have ever seen in the make money online niche, the banners for it are EVERYWHERE.
I’m not going to mention the specific program in this post, but as I write this there are at least three advertisers promoting the program on my blog so you should be able to figure out it. I personally have not investigated the program so I’m hardly in a position to offer an informed opinion about it, but that’s not the topic of this article anyway.
In the past two months I’ve had at least 20 people contact me to promote this particular program on my two blogs and I’ve turned most of them back. I’ve had to refund at least $1500 because many people sent me money without realizing there are already several people already promoting the program on my blogs. It’s come to the point now where I’ve had to put a notice on my advertise page explaining I will no longer take on any advertisements for this program.
I’m not looking to judge the quality of the program, but I do want to point out the psychology that it is creating. Like many affiliate programs, this system is multi-tiered and I expect the pyramid like growth you can experience if you get out there and recruit as fast as you can is one of the biggest selling points. It’s worked so well, people are throwing money at promoting it without understanding anything about online advertising.
Promote Fast or You May Miss Out!
Many of the people who sent me money to buy a text link, followed up with a query that goes “so what do I do next” or sent through long lines of capitalized letters screaming “GET RICH QUICK SCHEME”. I’m all for people experimenting with different advertisements to see how things work, but when you don’t know what a text link is, there are hundreds of other people promoting the same program and you are advertising how to make “thousands weekly” when you don’t make that money yourself or the only way to generate revenue is to sell more people into the same program, then something is wrong.
Programs like this appeal to the newbie Internet marketer and it’s almost like a right of passage to go through an experience like this so you can learn how foolish it is to expect to make money promoting programs about how to make money when you don’t make any money yourself. It’s like MLM in the offline business world – so many people try it, learn that is just doesn’t work for them, then move forward with a new found sense of maturity and a more realistic approach to business (well, hopefully anyway!).
My advice to anyone considering promoting a program online – and that’s any affiliate opportunity – learn how to effectively market online before spending money.
If you can’t answer these questions before you spend money on a promotion, don’t do it –
- Do you understand how the advertisement works? Is it pay per click or pay per impression or pay per month?
- Are you focusing on the best methods for the type of product you are promoting?
- How about the target audience – are you sure it’s the right market for what you offer?
- How is the traffic acquired?
- Can you and are you tracking your results?
- What is your break even point for acquiring a new lead (this tells you how much you can spend on traffic)?
- How about conversion rates?
- Given a type of media (text, banners, audio, video) do you know how to construct an ad that sells?
- Have you researched anything or are you just throwing money at something hoping it will work?
There’s a big difference between conducting careful controlled market research to see what advertising works versus blindly spending money as fast as you can because you are feeling the rush of greed. If anything doesn’t feel right or you can’t put all the pieces together in your head to understand how the big picture works, then chances are you won’t make any money.
Know what you are doing before you spend money and if you don’t know, spend money or time or both finding out. That’s a much smarter investment in the long term.
Yaro Starak
Patient Marketer
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These “programs” aren’t as popular as they seem. They have been around for years, but I guess it’s not until recently that a particular one is going big.
If you would ask me, I would say the program is some sort of a scam. People promote it because the referral rate is high up there and usually referring 2 people pays for your initial payment + profit. I won’t get too much into this, but most of you should realize that it is a continuous chain similar to a pyramid scheme.
-Mike
There is only one way to make easy money and that is if you win a lottery. All these get rich fast schemes will make only one person rich the one who started it and all the people promoting it and using it will be just the stepping stones for his/her money.
I think it is always better to follow the saying “if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is”.
I don’t know what the program is but the hype around it reminds me of the BlogRush launch. Due to the 10-tier referral program everybidy was so quick to jump on it but very few people stopped to think about how it would work.
When I first reviewed it, it occured to me that the problem with all of these multi-level marketing schemes is that unless the people at the very bottom level are taking the required action (whether its buying a product, clicking an ad, clicking a post etc), none of the people at the top tiers will see anything for their efforts.
This is why all those ‘paid to surf’ programs from years ago failed.
Lotteries are not actually a very good way to get rich fast. The only guaranteed way to win a lottery is not to play. The lottery is a tax on people that never learned basic math.
Yaro this is an excellent list of questions that shows the difference between someone who knows what they’re doing with marketing and advertising… and someone who doesn’t. You probably just saved a lot of people their shirts.
To my mind, we need to temper the about advice, ideal though they may be.
You say, “If you can’t answer these questions before you spend money on a promotion, don’t do it -”. It concerns me that the message being delivered there is “be an expert before you jump in”.
Looking at items 1-9 above I think for a newcomer to IM it will take a long long while for him/her to be an expert in of ALL of them.
There’s a point where, after learning a few BASICS here and there, people should just jump right in and learn as they go. Sure, they will stumble and fall, and “waste” some money in the process.
But I guess that’s the tuition fee we should all be ready to pay in the real world. The really important thing is for them to be able to stand fast after each fall and continue running until the next fall and repeat the same cycle
Ismael Tabije
http://www.BestManagementArticles.com
With the list of question you provide you helped me analyze where else in the fields of marketing and advertising online, I need to improve my strategies.