One of the things that is really very basic and easy but gets a very hard and scary reputation is media buys or media buying. What a media buy is basically, is when you approach a media source and offer to pay them directly for ad space. We’ll want to focus more on the Internet side of media buys (although there are definitely offline options as well) so allow me to provide an example.
Say that you’ve been checking out some particular websites that are in the niche of a particular affiliate offer your interested in or have already been running. You’ve narrowed it down to one particular website and know that it gets a certain amount of traffic each month. You approach the webmaster or owner of the website and make them an offer to place some type of advertisement on one or more pages. It would require quite a bit of research and testing beforehand but basically, once you get the information and specifics on how many people come to that website and would be seeing your ad per day, week or month, you can come up with a price that you’d be willing to pay in order to advertise there.
Now, usually, if you play your cards right and do your research then you should be able to get ad space fairly cheap. Once you’ve done out the nitty gritty details behind the scenes and have come up with a pretty solid conversion percentage or ratio, you can then just pay for that ad space, drive traffic to your landing page or affiliate offer and pretty much just wait for the conversions to roll in.
The absolute key behind all of this is that you’ve tested it before hand and know that for every X amount of visitors you’re going to get a Y amount of conversions. It’s really quite simple but you absolutely and positively NEED to do your research and then double, triple, quadruple — check that stuff ONE HUNDRED times. Your research and the amount of testing that you’ve done on a particular offer will usually make or break whether your media buy is successful.
I’ll be getting into more specifics on this topic in future posts but at least now you’ve got the basics down and can start further inquiring about setting something up for yourself.
Good luck!
