For a long time I focused entirely on free online advertising. I wrote blogs, submitted articles to EzineArticles.com and shared my posts on social media. I used Hubpages.com and Squidoo and various other article submission sites. I also created videos and managed to gain a few emails and clicks through to my website through this form of marketing. However. the time it has taken to do all this has been huge and the results very poor.
Paid advertising vs. free advertising
There are costs involved with both paid and free advertising:
Paid:
- Money – You have to put money into your advertising budget before you can perfect this form of marketing and you don’t know what will work  until you test several forms of your advert, budget and web pages.
- Risk – You are risking both your money and your time in the early stages. However, once you have mastered advertising you can leverage your advertising to spend less for greater results and you can also scale up once you have a winning advert.
Free:
- Time – You risk wasting your time creating articles/videos which may or may not rank in the searches. Google controls this and not you. Algorithms get changed all the time and so what might rank today for a certain group of keywords, won’t necessarily rank next week or in a year. Your efforts could be entirely wasted.
- Risk -Â Even with a good free marketing strategy, you risk all your time and efforts in creating content to bring in buyers. This content may not rank or even bring in the right target audience for your niche.
The trouble with free advertising is that it isn’t scalable. This is a major downside. Even if you spent thousands on creating a profitable advertising campaign before you got it working (i.e. profitable), you can then scale by increasing your budget. The time spent testing the adverts and finding the right target audience can then be capitalized on by scaling upwards to reach a greater audience.
With free advertising this isn’t possible. You spend your time creating content which may or may not get found by the masses. If one piece of content suddenly goes viral or is shared around the internet, this isn’t necessarily a strategy which can be scaled upwards, since each piece of content is unique.
Time is finite, whereas money is infinite
You might not be feeling that money is infinite at this exact moment but your life span definitely has a limitation – usually around 70 years. Money on the other hand will continue to live! The time you spend on creating content with the hope that it will rank on Google, is a much costlier use of that time than testing adverts and taking the paid route to marketing your business.
Of course this depends on whether you have a marketing budget in the first place but however small your marketing budget is, it’s definitely worth advertising your business with a paid campaign, however small initially.
Learn more about online advertising with this training course.