Friday, February 13, 2009

Save Your Company Money by Finding Free Advertising Space Online

By Alex Wu

Advertising is the key to success for many companies and their products or services.Advertising takes many forms from large budget advertisement placement on majorly trafficked billboards to word of mouth viral marketing campaigns.Effective advertising on a budget takes creativity and ingenuity.Read on to learn about the top three methods for getting free advertising on the Internet.

Utilize the news surrounding your company or product to get media coverage.Press coverage is by far the easiest and farthest reaching method for obtaining free advertising.Unfortunately, it often isn't completely controlled, but it can be influenced with precision.Start by writing press releases with an editorial angle and sending those releases out to a couple dozen of the free press release sites on the Internet.

Press releases are easy to write and easy to circulate.Go online and look at examples of press releases from your industry.Be sure to craft a couple of possible story angles into the press release to make it easy for journalists to find the story.To circulate your press release to a large audience utilize free press release sites.By submitting your press release to the site it will be viewed immediately by thousands of content editors and writers around the globe.

Make a list of your chosen press release sites and check off your submissions as you go.So how do you monitor the results of your new free public advertising campaigns?Easy, utilize a tool like Google's Google Alerts that will send you notification when your company is mentioned.Choose the keywords that you want in your search parameter including your website name, company and product name.

The second best method for free online advertising is to get direct coverage or advertising space on blogs and community websites that are geared to your industry or demographic.Contact editors directly and pitch stories based off of your press release.Ask if they would like to trade advertising spaces or if they would be willing to post an advertisement for you on their site to add content.

Consciously build your relationships with website managers and content editors.Keep in touch with monthly phone calls to touch base on the possibility of receiving free advertising coverage.By building business relationships with multiple editors you increase your chances of receiving free coverage exponentially.

As you build your relationships with sister sites, companies and service providers, look for ways in which you can collaborate with other companies.Sponsoring an event or product giveaway is the third best way to win free advertising space online.As part of your participation in the event ask that participants be required to give their email addresses to enter the contest and that you receive that list at the end of the contest.As part of the deal, you might want to negotiate a banner space on the website of the company you are working with.

Be sure to utilize the customer base that you built through your contest participants by reeling them into your company or product.Send out a newsletter to the contest participants shortly after the close of the contest and offer some sort of incentive for them to utilize your product or services.When you get a satisfied customer you get free advertising because the first thing they will do is tell their family and friends about their great experience. - 16890

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