Advertising is advertising. Whether it is offline or online. Only the modes of advertising vary. For example, in offline advertising you would make use of printed stationery like flyers, banners, ads placed in newspaper etc. etc.

It is pretty similar online. Online too you have banners, e-zine ads and classified ads.

There are many ways to advertise online. The most popular being banners. Banners are graphical images (generally animated) which you place on other websites. Why should you do that? The reason is a simple one. When a user clicks on this banner, s/he is lead to your web home page or your product page. Thus, it is believed that banner ads produce qualified leads.

Banner exchange programs are most common method for low budget marketers. You can place your banners on other sites that offer complimentary products and services to yours. In exchange for this you have to put up other banners on your website. Thus, you can place banners on other websites without paying a dime. MLM-ads.com is a good banner exchange program. Also bpath.com offers you a 1:1 exchange ratio on banner exchanges i.e. for every one banner hit on your website, your banner gets displayed on another website.

One word of caution. Even though banner ads are the most popular form of advertising they are not the most effective. To learn more click here to read The most widely utilized method of advertising, is sadly the least effective. In fact, it is HARMFUL. Find out more.

Besides banners, the next most popular means used is e-zine ads. E-zines are online newsletters. Nearly, everybody subscribes to some newsletter or the other. There are three kinds of E-zine ads. Ill describe them below:

Solo Ads

Solo Ads are ads that go by themselves to the entire mailing list. You make exactly the way you want it, publishers would not restrict you to a fixed number of words or lines. These ads pull in the most number of clicks and sales. The ratio being 2:1 against a Top Sponsor Ad and 3:1 against a Classified Ad

Top Sponsor Ads

Top Sponsor Ads are classified ads which get the most coveted position in an e-zine, which is usually the top. These ads also have a very good potential to pull in sales. They are usually restricted to 230 280 characters in all and about 4 lines.

Classified Ads

Classified Ads are ads which are placed in between articles of the e-zine and may be placed with out ads as well. These ads are not the most profit pulling, but a worth a try still. If written correctly, it has the potential to get clicks. These are best for testing purposes and also getting your hands wet in advertising.

A good place to start placing your e-zine ads is topezineads.com. It is by far one of the best websites for e-zine ads on the internet.

Pay-per-click search engines are another means for marketing. At present, they are being widely used and are the most cost-effective. They follow the performance based model and you pay only when somebody clicks on your website while performing a search.

You can bid for the clicks and accordingly, you will get ranked. Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords are both widely used, pay-per-click (PPC) programs. To find out more about this kind of advertising read How effective is pay-per-click advertising?

Another approach used by companies is entering into website partnerships. This is done for the mutual benefit of both parties. Both website help each other to generate traffic and get sales.

There are other ways too. But, I would advise you to keep out of FFA pages and so called classifieds. They would do more harm to your reputation than good.

This article is written by Gautamm Mehra, a certified bartender and enthusiast. You can write to him at gautam.mail@gmail.com.

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