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Internet Advertising for the Beginner and Small Business

Pittsburgh, Pa. May 2006

We are going to clarify and put this subject into focus in a usable form for the small businessperson or "the average guy".

The subject is broad and hundreds of books have been written on the topic. There's no way to digest them all. College textbooks, "how to" books; books for professionals; books for large business advertising departments.

Let's start with a few fundamental facts:

Everyone who has any kind of product or service to sell must advertise. They must advertise constantly regardless of if they are new or have an established brand. You have many choices of tools such as print media (subdivided of course into magazines, papers, etc.); public electronic media (radio, TV)... but as this is an Internet based article, we consider: E-mail; Ezines, Classifieds, Safelists and Pop Ups just to name a few. To be effective, one needs to use a full mix of available resources. The small, and particularly beginning business is assumed to have a very limited budget.

Have we covered the bases? Probably.

Are these items factual? Yes. All one has to do is to look around and see what's happening to confirm the information. Giants such as Pepsi, Coca Cola, McDonalds and Wendys, beer bottlers.. all with established branded names continually advertise and do so in all media.

On the Internet, the "gurus" also continuously advertise. Pick a name, do a search engine search and see the tools.

You must advertise to get people to read your message. It's no longer enough to build a great web page and it will do your work.

Your job is to get people to that site. No one will buy from you if they don't hear or see your message. In fact, it has to be seen several times.

Random, one shot exposures such as a visit from a PPC ad or a search will not do it. That is also one of the "cast in concrete" bullet points that should be listed at the beginning of this article.

The corollary to that is you must have REPEATED exposures of your message.

Let's look at some of your options and see if they meet that criteria:

PPC: No Banners: No Classifieds: No Safelists: No FFA: No

But there are some "Yes" answers if it's done right.

These include Email and Ezines (repeated readerships). Email has limitations. Unless you have permission to do repeat emails, you are probably spamming and in fact, the recipient may have your message "auto trashed".

But there's a way to do use these two tools.

What is the first objective of your advertising?

Think about that for a minute. We're going to take a line of space here for you to answer that. You say , "Joe, the objective is to get my reader to buy from me".

Close, but no cigar. If' I'd agree with that as the LONG TERM objective, How is it accomplished and what is the SHORT TERM objective?

Here's the Lesson of the Year... make that the decade, and make it the lesson for both the novice and veteran advertiser; the small business person and the large business.

THE OBJECTIVE IS TO GET A NAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS ACCOMPANIED BY PERMISSION TO CONTACT THE PERSON.

Let me repeat that:

THE OBJECTIVE IS TO GET A NAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS ACCOMPANIED BY PERMISSION TO CONTACT THE PERSON.

Now when you do this you have the beginning of a list, and if you talk with any Internet Guru, they will first all agree, and then tell you that they all have PERSONAL lists numbering in the tens of thousands. Many have lists of over 100,000 names and it is their most valuable asset. Their books, their courses, their products can all be hijacked, duplicated, or whatever. Their list is their wealth.

Some will say that from any advertisement they run, they would far rather get an email and name than make an immediate sale (Stephan Ducharme, for example, in his free audio interview).

If this is then the agreed upon objective, the first task and goal of the small businessman is to learn how to build their list, or as an option, have access to the list of a proven successful business person who operates in the same marketing field. That, by the way, at first seems nearly impossible... but using certain procedures available to virtually anyone if you know where you look, you CAN access and nearly duplicate that list and do it first legally, and secondly at virtually no cost!

So, Mr. or Ms Small Business person: What is your FIRST objective in business? In fact almost before designing your product or service, and second only after choosing your market?

YOUR FIRST OBJECTIVE is to LEARN how to Build or Acquire a List. In short, to get to your future customer base.

Here's the meat of this article, and HOW TO DO IT... and yes, there is a catch 22 in a way. It takes advertising to get advertising! Like it takes money to make money.

So the trick: To do it as cost effectively and as productively as possible.

Think of it as fishing. You have to use some bait to catch fish. The fish you catch might become the bait for even larger fish. But you have to have some bait first.

You are going to "fish" this way and the "fish" you are looking for are names and email addresses.

Your "Bait" or "baited hook" is going to be an irresistible free offer.

There's no strings attached to this free offer except to get it, the person gives you a name and email address to get it!

So now we go into Phase II... We must define what an "irresistible offer" is. That's objective #1 here. Then we must decide where it is we are going to "fish" and how. If we were fishing in "the real world" we'd want to do it where we know there are fish, right.

Where are the fish located in your area of interest?

One great place is Ezines. As opposed to "the ocean at large" (think running classifieds, FFAs, etc) we might know where there's a "good fishin' hole"... or sunken reef; etc. In fact, we know by type of "fishin' spot" if we can find trout, muskies, sailfish, cod... etc.

The subject of an EZine group is your defined "fishin" hole.

But before we can go "fishin'", we need some equipment, and we need how to use it.

Equipment here is the tool to collect leads and start the response. A good autoresponder is a must, and of course, knowing how to set it up is like knowing how to bait your hook.

Let's recap in this primer: The primary objective of any advertising is to capture and build a targeted name list.

When you have the name list, you can create multiple soft sales campaigns with the contact it needs to lead to a sale action.

You build the list by first doing targeted advertising which does not sell anything but extends some kind of free offer that offers the target market an item of true value and interest in return for only requesting it; the request requires that they provide you with a name and email address and at least an implied permission to respond to their request.

If you have learned these three points, you are well on your way to getting to the head of the pack.

Your follow up lessons simply now become technique and learning where the tools are. Be careful as you select the tool, you select one from a source who has the credibility in using it and you are not just "buying into" someone's new, but unproved idea. Various Internet searches will lead you to the right sources.

Learn and prosper!

http://www.rbizsite.com/faga.html will take the reader to a working example site as

discussed in the article and provide additional resources for advanced study of the topic discussed

(How To Get 1 Million visitors without paying a single dime)

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