If You Want To Get There Faster, You're Going To Have To Pay

If you want to get further faster, you're going to have to open
your wallet and use some paid options. There is something for
everyone, and each method can suit practically every budget. But
how do you know which will work best for you? Let's explore the
options.

First though, a word of warning.

With a plethora of free marketing opportunities available
including blogging and social media, it can be easy to get sucked
into the "always free" mode of operating. And while free is
great, it takes longer to see results, and sometimes you get what
you pay for. So as you read this article keep in mind that you
want to have free mixed in, but not be beholden to any single
source of customers. And if you want to reach your goals faster,
you've got to pay.

Having said that, let's take a look at the most popular options
available today.

The Immaturity Of The Internet Television is a mature media.
There are channels that can reach every demographic everywhere in
the world. It's highly segmented. Online marketing and
advertising hasn't quite reached that point, but with the reach
of the web and the large number of websites popping up on a daily
basis, we're just about there.

Let's take a look at some of the most popular paid options
available today.

Pay-Per-Click (And It's Relatives) Google made a mint with those
highly targeted text ads; it still does. If you've done your
keyword research and have the language of your market, you can
use pay-per-click (PPC) to validate niche markets and get highly
targeted visitors to your website. But Google isn't the only
game in town.

Yahoo!/Bing has a great PPC network which can also bring highly
relevant visitors and might cost less than what you'd pay on
Google. Advice here is to launch campaigns on both and see where
you get the most bang for your buck, measured using the
combination of a high click through rate (CTR) and low cost per
click (CPC).

Pay per click has a lot of relatives too with varying rules and
return on investment. A few are:

* Cost Per Action (CPA)

* Cost Per View (CPV)

* Cost Per Lead(CPL)

Paid Ad Placements Paid ad placements come in a few forms. You
can purchase banner advertisements on websites relevant to your
products and services, as well as place graphic ads in email
newsletters. A huge benefit of these placements is the
demographic targeting. If you want to reach marketers you can do
that; if you want to reach software developers you can do that;
if you want to reach working mothers that have young children
with acute health problems, you can do that too.

There are literally websites for every audience today, and many
of those sites have email newsletters. Paid advertisements are
one of the top ways website owners make money, so as a purchaser
you can have your pick based on your budget.

Affiliate Programs Affiliate programs aren't "open your
wallet" kind of things, however you are paying someone else to
bring you customers. Affiliate marketing is a huge business, as
evidenced by the laws enacted in many states to tax online
purchases. Regardless, every business can take advantage of
having an affiliate program, and many do.

Have you ever paid someone a "finder's fee" for referring you
a customer? That's an informal affiliate program of sorts.
Resellers are affiliates too - they sell a product someone else
makes, and take care of a bulk of the marketing and sales.

So you might already have one of these programs in place, albeit
an informal one.

Reasons To Go Paid As mentioned in the beginning of this article,
a major reason to open your wallet is to get to your goals
faster. Free methods are free in terms of money, but not in time
- they can take a long time to return a result, if they ever do.

As much as it sounds like an oxymoron, using methods like PPC can
actually save you money and time. There are few better market
validation strategies than setting up a survey and sending
targeted, highly relevant visitors to it. You can find out if a
market is worth your time or not, very quickly.

Long story short, don't discard paid strategies even if you
think you can't afford them - it simply isn't true. Start your
efforts small and go from there. In combination with the free
methods, you'll be on your way to more leads and more customers.