Insider Advertising Report

Chapter 12: How To Advertise A Product That Has No Immediate Needs

If you run services like web hosting services, property classified portal or you are simply selling donuts online, you may find it difficult to advertise your products or services because your ad may not generate immediate sales.

If you use advertising solutions such as Pay Per Click, you may still be alright because you only pay for the traffic that is interested in your service or product. But if you advertise through ezine ads, traffic exchange, pop up or pop under traffic or you simply purchase targeted traffic, you will have a problem because most of the traffic may not need your service or product at the moment they see your ad!

They may need your service or product in the future, but by then, they would have forgotten your existence, unless you have a huge advertising budget and you keep on advertising your business.

So what can you do?

There are two solutions to this.

1) Instead of selling your service or product, you can use your advertising effort to build list.

For example, if you are selling donuts, you can create a mailing list and invite all donut lovers to join your list for special discount.

Think about this: If you are a donut lover and I tell you that you will be given a free sample of our new donut favor whenever we have one. All you need to you is to join our mailing list. Would you be keen to join our mailing list?

I bet you will!

Once you are on our list, I can send you emails of our weekly donut promotion and other offers. I also email you testimonials of customers who have purchased our donuts before. Being a donut lover, I'm sure you will at least try out 1 box of donut from me.

2) The second solution is to advertise your affiliate program or viral program instead of your product.

For an example, one of my clients provided hard disk recovery service. Frankly I've not heard of such a service until they advertised with me.

When they first advertised their service, the response was bad.

This was no surprise because people wouldn't have a hard disk crash all the time!

I suggested to them that they could advertise their affiliate program and they did.

As expected, the sign up for their affiliate program was great and they continue to get referrals for their hard disk recovery service from time to time.

Besides affiliate program, you can also think of a viral program that can multiply your purchased traffic into unlimited traffic!

For example, if you have a viral program that can make every lead you purchase to bring in 10 extra leads to your website, 1000 leads purchased will multiply into 10,000 leads to your website and these 10,000 will multiply into 100,000 leads to your website and on and on....

Ok, the actual process is not going to be as perfect as what I've illustrated, but the idea is there.

Let's look at one successful example from another advertiser.

The advertiser sells story books, a product that is very difficult to advertise because it is hard to target the right group of people.

Instead of selling his story books, the advertiser promoted a viral system, in which people got paid for every book review email they sent out to their friends!

This is very viral and powerful.

The email they send out is not a simple invitation email but a full review, written as if they are recommending the book!

The email starts with "Hi, I just came across this very touching local love story..."

If you receive this email from your friend and you happen to like reading love stories, I'm sure you'll want to find out more about this book and even purchase a copy!

This method has worked well for this advertiser.