Avoid Bankruptcy: Advertise the right way

Have you thought about starting your own online business? Have you already started and feel overwhelmed from high advertising costs? I know the feeling.

I had squandered a lot of money buying advertising for my online business until recently. I am the founder of Skill Development Institute, a company that provides great typing and academic study lessons.

I tried pay-per-click advertising, paid-to-click advertising and advertising in which you pay to have a lot of visitors come to your site. I must inform you that these methods do not work especially if you do not have much experience and you are not established. Almost all of these visitors will either not actually see your site due to special gimmicks or they will quickly leave your site after being brought to your home page. Furthermore, your conversion rate will probably be too low to overcome the high amount of money you spent for advertising. Even the most successful online entrepreneurs probably do not convert more than three to five of every one hundred visitors into paying customers.

There is an effective and cost-efficient way to advertise. It is called writing articles. Please do not be frightened. I initially thought you had to be an established expert to write articles. Not so. You just need to find online ezines that accept article submissions and write great content based on what you know about the products or services you are selling. Write what is on your mind. Try to write at least 300 to 500 words for every article. To avoid looking shallow and to avoid being ignored by search engines, submit an article with a different title and different content to various sites that accept article submissions.

You will benefit greatly from writing a lot of articles. You usually do not have to pay anything to submit articles. You will be seen as an expert and establish credibility. You will attract targeted visitors to your site. You will leave a lot of back links to your site and boost your search engine rankings. You will gain plenty of free exposure for a lifetime. As you search for sites that let you submit articles, you will find sites that pay you to write material and recruit writers. If you find a site that pays you to recruit writers such as shvoong.com, you can use the referral link they give you to recruit writers on your site. You will also find sites that are great for those who have an interest in publishing their own books.

Lulu and Palibra are great sources for self-publishing. Lulu does not charge a setup fee and just takes a commission of twenty percent for any sales that you make. They let you publish books, E-books, CDs, brochures, calendars, audio work, etc. They give you control of the format you want to use and the images you want to use for your materials.

Palibra lets authors provide their works for 99 cents apiece. They do not charge a setup fee and they pay you thirty cents for each narrative that you sell. Stop wasting money on advertising and get busy writing!

Todd Hicks
Skill Development Institute