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The main way I make my money is through Pay per click marketing (called SEM - Search Engine Marketing).
Today, I want to talk to a much less talked about, higher risk and potentially much more profitable way of making money online through affiliate marketing. This method is called Media buying.
A media buy in basic terms is when you pay a website (or agency) to display your banner on their site. You generally pay on a per one thousand impressions (ad views) basis. This is called CPM. This means that no matter if people click your ad or not, you pay per each one thousand views of the ad.
A standard CPM can cost anywhere from less than a dollar up to $20+. Many places (larger websites) require a minimum purchase of $5,000 - $10,000.
Doing a media buy on Myspace for example will run you a minimum of $10,000 ( I believe ) and around $1.70 CPM.
Now, because we're not actually paying per click, the game changes a bit. No longer are we focusing on quality score or even relevancy like having keywords in the ad... Now we are focusing on getting the attention of visitor so we can get as many clicks in that 1000 impressions as possible.
I've heard stories of experienced media buyers hitting profit margins upwards of 5000%! Now that is impressive eh?
Needless to say, it does take a lot of experience, work, and most importantly money. A great place to start however would be getting your experience via places like myspace self service advertising network, facebook self service ads, and even adwords content network with image ads!
Once you get a handle on a great converting ad, you can try your hand at some of the smaller media buys and go from there.
Interesting that you bring up this topic. Just bought a flat fee $500 banner on a site. Should be interesting on what happens.
I think running image campaign in the content network would be a good way to test. Though, I do think more CPA networks need to have their image creatives in compliance with Google’s image terms (less than 50KB for example). I setup an image placement campaign today that should’ve only taken a few minutes, but I had to go change the formats from .gif to .jpg to reduce the file sizes. Pain.
Ruck has been doing some good posts on this lately over at the convert2media blog.
That is exactly what i have been planning on doing and i hope it pays out and im also setting up an affiliate program as well.
I’m testing a few things out and will consider this. Strange this is with this internet malarky, is it doesn’t run as a business model, Google PPC being the example you used. Once you change system you are thrown trying to advertise without having to worry about scores and the like. It is almost as if you work in automatic pilot and in a comfort zone.
Mentioning another system to earn money and the chills run up my spine.
Good post all the same.
Hey Jonathan,
You should make a post of the tools or software you use to run your buisness? or like a page? and have a post that says what tools and tech stuff your getting for Christmas because if you did I would buy it
-austin
wow thats a high roi
I was just thinking about this. I see all those banners all over Yahoo (especially those irritating mortgage ones). Do you think these are media buys by individuals, or by the company that is being advertised? I am sure it is a combo of both, but which do you think are predominate on the larger sites?
Yes those were the good ole days, sponsorship, branding, and mass audiences at the flick of a switch. It was said “50% doesn’t work, just dont know which 50%” – Anonymous
It was also said, “Nobody sells nothin’, you create buying environments,” — Bill Bernbach