Media Buying

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.