By: Morgan Lighter

I only worked seriously about three months of the year. Another
quarter I did enough work to sustain me. For about two quarters a
year, I rested and did my physical therapy.

When I didn't want to work, or couldn't, ezine advertising not only
paid my bills, it kept me comfy. A lot of people will tell you to rely
on AdWords. There's nothing wrong with any type of search engine
marketing if you know enough about it to maintain a decent conversion
rate, and have enough money to keep your sales steady.

My preference was for testing with small ezine ads, and then, when
they test well, solo ads. Six months out of the year, I would hire
someone to look at my product and write me two ads, an ezine ad and a
solo ad. All told, a really good copywriter that specializes in
advertising would cost me $300 or less.� I can write a decent ad
pulling about 15% for visits, and then 3% of those for sales, but do
the math: if a specialist can get me 25% for visits, even if the sales
conversion rate remains steady, I've made a lot more money. So
investing $100 for a solo ad in a high quality publication of about
10, 000 visitors would bring me 1500 visitors, and then about 45
sales.
Still, I wouldn't suggest ezine advertising for everyone.

Pros? Instead of keyword research, you just do publication research.
Is the publication targeted? Did the smaller ad yield good results?
Then it's on. If not, you've wasted maybe $10. So add to that cost
effective. I'd spend around $100 - $250 just to Test pay per click
results. A sampling of less than 100 visitors isn't really worth the
effort. The return is bettery when you hit paydirt on the right
publication.

There are more pros, but you get the idea, more money, less effort,
more cost effective.

Cons? It's not as predictable as pay per click and returns aren't as
immediate. You don't always know when your ad is going to run. Even if
you get a special where the ad goes out within three days, you don't
know when the prospect is going to read the ezine or if it will make
it through their filters (which I believe accounts for most of the
return rate.) Pay per click has it beat there.

You also have to be careful of saturation. In a publication of 10,000,
with a visit rate of 15%, I would only run the same ad for the same
product ten times, and that's over the course of several months. I'd
also say that this is more of a method for a career affiliate or
career infoproduct entrepreneur. Almost anyone else is better off with
AdWords, or a combination of other online marketing methods. But
here's a clue - use this method to earn the initial effort for an
AdWords campaign.

Of course, no smart marketer uses only one technique. I use AdWords
when I want an immediate, controlled response, and have the attention
span to test and track the results, and have the time to do the
research. Even in the beginning, I always had the money to invest -
but I've found that I get a better return from a combination of
several methods that includes ezine advertising on my own products.

You can do your marketing the smart way too. There are over 1000 free
pages of free traffic information at http://freetraffictip.com and on
Fridays we feature Tooltime Fridays to help you get your work done
faster. Come by and learn as much as you can read about traffic,
today.

Author Resource:->  Author of Tool Time Friday at Free Traffic Tip, aka, Increase Your Website Traffic.