How to Advertise Your Website or Business: 8 Paid Advertising Models

Advertising is one easiest ways to get targeted traffic to your website. The deluge of visitors that arrive at your site through paid advertising channels may purchase a product, browse around your website, or perhaps subscribe to a newsletter or feed.

Some will also bookmark your website online for future visits, share it through social media websites or recommend it to friends.

While advertising isn’t an end-all solution for increasing your site income or audience size, it can definitely create more mind-share and brand exposure. Here are a collection of ways to market your website to relevant audiences.

8 Types of Paid Advertising Models for Your Website

Note that these are paid advertising channels and are not free promotional methods. I’ve included a brief comment on each advertising model, based on my personal experience and knowledge about them.

1. Pay-per-Click Advertising. Very targeted traffic from search engines. Excellent if you are promoting affiliate programs or building an email list through landing pages. Great if you are selling products on your website as well.

   Site-targeted advertising is very useful as well. PPC might not be necessary if you are primarily running a content website and already rank well for multiple relevant keywords.




2. Ezine or Newsletter advertising. Traffic is especially targeted if you can arrange for a personal recommendation within the newsletter/ezine by the owner. It can be hard to discern the value of the subscriber base so initially run test ads for short periods of time. Might not be useful to promote the same website several times on the same list as the members are largely the same.




3. Banner Advertising. Depending on the placement, banner ads are great for branding purposes. In my opinion, click through rates and traffic is strongly related to banner design, tagline and the relevance of the site you are advertising on.




4. Feed-based Advertising. From what I’ve heard from others, it’s slightly more difficult to measure Feed advertising’s ROI. Poor click through rates are usually the case for feed advertising although it can serve as branding scheme if one advertises on a site with a large subscriber base. There are various feed advertising networks which can help you to buy ad space on specific feeds.




5. Paid Reviews on Blogs. It’s important to pick quality bloggers with a decent amount of integrity, trust, reach and authority. I would also recommend choosing a blogger that doesn’t do paid reviews very often in order to maximize the mental attention directed towards each review.

   The more objective the review, the better. Undisclosed reviews will generally work better but it is difficult to find high quality bloggers that don’t disclose.




6. Text Link Advertising. Useful because it can provide you with some SEO benefits. I would pick a high traffic site over one with a high PageRank anytime. Design your anchor text to encourage click throughs and ensure that your link is placed in a visible location and not somewhere like the footer.

   It’s usually better and cheaper to contact websites directly to inquire if they sell text links, instead of using a network.




7. Contests. This is not technically a form of paid advertising but can be considered so when you offer a substantial cash prize or product to generate buzz, links, traffic and new member signups. Marketing contests can also held whereby the winners will be determined according to the amount of traffic referred to your site.




8. Paid Syndication. This involves a sponsorship of a website, whereby your content will be syndicated and integrated into the framework of the site in question. Techmeme is an example of a meme tracker that offers paid syndication and displays sponsor posts on its sidebar and in-between regular content.

What’s the Best Way to Find Websites to Advertise On?

While you can easily find relevant websites through third party ad networks, I highly recommend using the following method instead because it will guarantee higher referral traffic and greater brand exposure.

1. Make a list of the search terms/keywords relevant to your website’s theme.
2. Enter these keywords into search engines like Google and Yahoo
3. The best websites to advertise on are within the Top 30 search results
4. Contact each of these websites and inquire about advertising

Getting links from these related websites has the added benefit of improving your own search engine rankings, not to mention that you’ll save a considerable amount of money.

For example, Dosh Dosh ranks well for several money related keywords and as a result, I often receive emails from affiliate marketers and webmasters who want to promote their product or website by buying ad space here.

It’s a smart move after all. Why struggle to rank well on search engines when you can rent a prime spot from an authority site that already does that for you?

Keep this point in mind when purchasing advertising for your website: Try to pick sites that are already ranking for all keywords that are relevant to your site.

Found this post useful? Consider subscribing to Dosh Dosh’s blog feed.