These advertising products are everywhere. I bet you have some right now.  I also think someone in your household has actually PAID good money for some of them.  How many shirts, hats, mouse pads, coffee mugs do you see laying around with advertisements for brand names on them.  Advertising the GAP, Abercrombie, Nike, Ford.  Your business can do it too.  Here’s how:

Start by selecting a few products to have your logo printed or embroidered on.  Things that your customers might find useful.  This is the key really, the customer, not you, has to find the item useful.  That is why you see so many pieces of clothing used for this walking advertisement.  Next have some of these items printed up and place them for sale within your store.  It is that simple.  As the items sell, you are getting free advertising.

Here is an example:

Let’s start with a set of shirts (T-shirt and Polo), a hat and a coffee mug.  I am going to use my business costs for these items as an example, your supplier may be different.  There are two basic methods to get your logo onto these items.  For clothing you can have it either embroidered or printed.  Printing can be screen printed, direct to garment, digital heat transfer or sublimation printing.  I am not going to go into the differences here.  If you have ever had any type of advertising apparel made you may already know the difference.  I prefer digital heat transfer or sublimation.  Sublimation only works on polyester products while digital heat transfer works on cotton products.  Cotton being the least expensive that is what I will use as an example.  Depending on the quantity, hats are a great give away, but don’t always sell well.  Face it everyone has hats and unless it is a really good price, why buy more.  But this is for advertising so why not have a few of them laying around for sale.  I buy blank hats by the dozen and they can costs as little as $1.25 each.  Then you have to have them printed on.  Total cost may be as little as $2.50 depending on the quantity ordered.  Price them for under $5 and I bet you will sell them.  Even if you sell them for $3 a piece, you make a profit and the customer is advertising for you for free.  T-shirts and polo shirts probably cost a little more for printed logo.  Embroidery cost a little more, I think my price is about $5 a shirt on polo shirts plus the cost of the shirt.  As you can see, this is not as expensive as some people think.  Double the cost and put them up for sale.  For really good customers, you can offer a discount

I work with campgrounds and this is becoming a great way for them to make extra money.  They are starting to produce a whole line of branded items for sale in their stores.  I have a plumber who gives away stuff to all of his new customers.  We practice what we preach so to speak with giveaway hats at the Chamber of Commerce meetings, when we are camping, and when we go to trade shows.  I even manage to sell a few every now and then.

So the next time you are walking or driving around, look at all the paid for advertising around you, from the back of vehicles, on the people walking by and in the store windows.  Then think how you could be using this as a way to increase your business and reduce your advertising costs.

Raymond Laubert is owner of Laubert Enterprises, which does business as Camping Embroidery.  Camping Embroidery offers embroidery and digital printing services to campground owners, campers, clubs and organizations for fund raising opportunities and small businesses who want to be able to order small quantities.  Camping Embroidery’s website is http://www.campingembroidery.com and for fund raising please visit Zero 2 Won at http://www.zero2won.com.

Pay Per Impression

With PPI banner advertising you are paid each time your advertiser’s banner is shown on your web pages. A term CPM is often used with banner advertising. It means cost per thousand, which basically means you will be paid $x.xx for every 1000 banners displayed to the visitors of your web site This is the easiest method to earn money with as every time someone visits your web site you get paid. However, this is not used very much and is very easily abused. If you have a 1000 visitors per day and are paid $5 per thousand then you make $150 per month. As an advertiser you do NOT want to use PPI. It would be like paying the newspaper or phone company money every time they said someone opened the newspaper or phonebook.

Pay Per Click

With PPC banner, you are paid more than with PPI but only when the visitor actually clicks on the banner rather then just seeing it. With PPI you many be paid $5.00 CPM (per thousand) and with PPC you could be paid $5 per click. However, not as many will click on the banner. Banner design has a lot to do with what we call the conversion rate. That is basically how effective is the banner. Conversion rates for banners are usually less than 1%. A very good banner may have a 5% conversion rate. Remember that is a passive income stream. It is working around the clock and requires no work on your part. So, if you have 1000 people a day coming to your web site and you have a 1% conversion rate with a payment of 50 cents per click, you could be earning $150 a month just for having the banner there. As an advertiser this is a little better than PPI.

At least now the visitor is on your web site and you have a chance to gather information about them and possibly sell them your product or service.

Pay Per Sale/Lead

PPS banner advertising using pays the highest dollars of these three methods, but only generates income when the advertiser makes a sale to someone visiting from your web site It will have the lowest conversion rate of the three. PPS banners only work well for the web site owner if the advertiser does a good job with the banner design (creating a desire to click), selling (presenting information), and closing (getting the sale). None of these do you control directly. Selecting PPS advertisers for your site should be well thought out. As an advertiser, this is the preferred type of banner advertising.

Where to find advertisers

I think the best place to find people that want to place banner ads on your site will be the affiliate programs. This is also a good place for you to advertise that you would like to place banners on others sites as well. Read the pages carefully. Banners can be expensive if you don’t generate any sales.

If you have friends or business associates that you do business with you can ask them if they would like to place a banner on your site

or if you could place a banner on theirs. These exchanges become more and more popular as your site becomes more popular as well.

A new source for banner ads is from the major search engines. Google Adwords are probably the best known new source for advertising on pay per basis. This works both ways. You can pay to have your ad/banner placed on others sites as well as have other web site ads placed on your site. When your ad is displayed and someone clicks on it they will visit your site and you pay Google for the visit. When you allow Google to place ads on your site and someone clicks the ad, you get paid.

In the resource section of rd-webhosting.com you will find more information on using banners to market your website.

My auto responder sees that email come in and has a set of actions defined that when the subject has subscribe in it that it will email back to you our newsletter. Another thing th at the auto responders can do is following up with your customers

at predetermined times with a predetermined letter. This is good for driving traffic to your site after they have visited and left their email address such as to subscribe to a newsletter or download a free chapter of an e-book or other information you have made available. For my training business I send up to 4 different emails to each person that request my guide to increase their income. Each email introduces them to other benefits and services that are available. Some of the emails will offer a discount or free training class as an incentive to sign up for a class. All of it done without me having to get involved. Auto responders can be installed on your computer or used via the Internet. Some are free and others you have to pay either by the email address or based on the number of responses you want to program it to respond to. Here are some links to auto responders on the web as well as a software package with a trial version you can use yourself. Promasoft: This is the one we use with our servers. I highly recommend. They have a trial version that is a full version. It places a header in the outgoing email, so you will want to register once you have it up and running. I think it is a great program. GetResponse: This is also a great program, although, this one is a subscription service. It can be a less expensive way to try out an auto responder. They do offer a free account as well.

Ask any businessperson what they would pay to be in a mall that got 3 million visitors a day. You can see the dollar signs light up in their eyes… both in terms of cost and sales potential. Remember my goal from earlier in the course when we talked about business planning? I need to have 4200 visitors a month come to my web site in order to sell 420 copies according to my business plan. Well E-Bay gets 3 million visitors a day!

Do you think that might be a place that I would want to advertise my books or my web site? You bet! In fact I have sold quite a few of my other books on E-Bay as well as bottles, baseball cards, clothing, computers, software, training, video and much more. So can you.

Let’s take my Weekend Chef’s guides and see how I can sell them on E-Bay, Yahoo Auctions, or MSN Auctions. First I need an account. This is simple, but does vary based on which you are signing up with. Follow the instructions (at the end of this page is an excellent course on how to really make money on auctions, but this will get you started). Once you have an account, we now need to place something for sale. Think of the auction site as your web site As such we need to create a web page that offers you product/service for sale. I use a software package call Auction Wizard 2000. They have an excellent program that allows you to try it for 60 days before you have to register. It is so easy to use as well. Using Auction Wizard, I can create an auction page and automatically post it and re-post as needed to any of the supported auctions. No special knowledge of html is required. Simple fill-in the blanks and add any pictures or graphics and I’m done. It also will track the sales, send emails to successful bidders, track inventory and so much more. If you are thinking of doing auctions, this is one piece of software to take a hard look at.

Back to selling my guides and building my business. Within the auction listing, I can place a link to my site, offer a free download of some chapters of the book, of course, I will need your email before you can download. Remember that I need to keep you coming back. Be careful here, E-Bay does not like you selling outside of their auction so make sure the visitor is not allowed to buy from your site at that link. Well, now we have given something away for free (a chapter of the book), we have the visitors email address, and we hopefully will get a bid on the product/service. If not, we have the email to follow up. What has it cost us? Each item up for auction on E-Bay cost, are you ready for this, 30 cents to list it plus a small percentage of the selling cost. If I list my Weekend Chef’s Guide to Sushi on E-Bay with a starting price of say $1 it will cost me a total of about 30 cents for the week. 30 cents to reach millions of potential customers a day. If I sell the book, I will have recovered my 30 cents and started building my customer email list as well.

Now I could write a series on using auctions, but this page is just how to use auctions to market your business. You can sell items and make a profit or you can just list items and build a customer database to market too later. Either way Auctions make a great way to market your business.

I have on my website a couple more tips on using auctions as well at rd-webhosting.com or visit my eBay store for other e-books that are available from time to time.

Over the years I have been involved with many businesses, and one of the things I remember from my Amway days was that as an individual, I could only do so much. I have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year in which I can work. I will hit a maximum point of sales that I can handle by myself. After that I’m done. The only way to do more is to automate and have others duplicate what I do. The same is true on the web.

We need to automate and duplicate what we do so we can have others expand our sales for us. The first part of this equation is duplication. We can have others follow what we do and sell our products and services for us and pay them a portion of the profits. This is different than having employees. Employees have no requirement to sell. They are overhead that must be paid regardless of sales. That is NOT what you want for a new business. Keep your hard-earned cash for other things. What we need is someone that is willing to do the work for part of the profits. This is where affiliate programs come in to our formula for success. Affiliates are basically a partnership between web sites to advertise and promote products, services, or information for a share of the profits. When someone they refer to you buys, you pay them a percentage of the sales. Result? More traffic, more sales and less time required by you to find the customers as someone else does it for you.

Wh at else c

an a good affiliate program do for you?

• How about driving more traffic to your site!
• Build brand awareness as more people visit your site from the hundreds or thousands of affiliates that are advertising for you.
• Obtaining qualified leads that you can follow-up on to increase or up sell to.
• Increasing the links to your site, which will increase the ranking of your site on the search engines resulting in more traffic and more sales.

There are all kinds of affiliate programs. Some programs charge to be a member and some do not. Some are web based and some are software programs that you load on your computer to set up and track the sales and affiliate yourself. Which one you use is up to you. Here are a few that I have found.

Affiliate Net – This is one of the more affordable server side affiliate programs. With this software there are no monthly fees only a one-time software charge. At the time of this writing this package sold from $49.95 to $99.95. Referral Software – This package is also server side although more expensive, it has many more features and is worth while to consider if you are serious about earning a lot of money with your Internet business. At the time of this writing this package sold for $299.00.

Click Bank – This is a web based affiliate program. By signing up on their web site you have access to over 100,000 affiliates. ClickBank is free to be an affiliate and has a charge if you want to run an affiliate program for your products.

clixGalore Affiliate Networks – This is a web based affiliate program. There are monthly and set up fees.

I highly recommend affiliate programs. For the reasons listed above. Remember they will help drive traffic to your site, which means more sales and you can use the affiliate programs to offer others services and make the commission once you are done with the client. This could be a good business all by its self.