This week guest writer and IM genius Avery Berman tells his paid advertising secrets. Avery has been in the marketing business since his early teens and is one of the few marketers I have met who tells it like it is with no fluffy b/s added on top. Plus I like Avery because he still has a Myspace page..he doesn’t care what anyone thinks! =) Oh and he’s also a pretty good musician.

Here’s Avery:

Why Not Using Paid Advertising Is Actually Costing You Money

It seems to me that most people have an ungrounded terror towards paid advertising. The more people I talk to, the more I hear the same fears and issues over and over…

People say things like “I don’t have enough money to spend on advertising,” or “I’m not sure how to do paid advertising,” or “Why should I use paid advertising when I can just use free advertising?”

If you’re in the internet marketing space, you’ve probably said some of these things yourself.

Well, I’m here to make you change your mindset, because these thoughts are actually hurting you.

For starters, let’s reframe what paid advertising is.

If I walked up to you and said “Hey bud! I’ll give you $1.50 for every dollar you give me,” how many dollars would you give me?

As many as you could, right?

Well, that’s paid advertising.

The goal is to simply pay less than you are making, and it’s not a horrible time getting to that point.

Allow me to address the concerns I mentioned earlier.

First let’s talk about the response I hear most often from people…

“I don’t have enough money to spend on advertising.”

Quite frankly, unless you have absolutely no money to spend on anything other than rent and food, I don’t believe that for a second. You sure seem to have enough money to buy ebook after ebook all telling you the same thing… or even worse, all telling you different things!

Stop buying ebooks. There is not a thing in the world that can teach you more than spending and losing money on advertising.

If you still can’t find any money, then go out to eat less and stop wasting money on movies. I don’t know about you, but where I live two movie tickets are about $30 now. A meal out for two is about $20 if you do it cheap. That’s $50 right there you can use on advertising.

And the more you spend, the more you will learn.

Also consider that there is little chance you will actually lose ALL the money you spend. You may not make all of it back, but you will probably get a conversion or two and make back part of your money.

“I’m not sure how to do paid advertising!”

Then you definitely need to get in there and do some. As I said before, nothing teaches you better than actually being in the thick of it.

However, if you need direction, there are tons of excellent resources and forums online where you can learn the basics to get you going. Past that, it’s up to your own experience.

“Why should I use paid advertising when I can just use free advertising?

When you are doing free advertising methods, you are trading time for money. (And in many cases no money.)

Free methods are long and time consuming and have no promises at all of return.

Paid advertising is trading money for time. And isn’t one of the reasons you wanted to start making money online in the first place? To free up time?

On top of that though, when you find a paid campaign that works, you can simply duplicate it and scale it up and start making more money by doing almost no additional work…. and it’s all on autopilot.

I’ve literally had campaigns go steady for months at a time with me barely doing anything to it.

You can not achieve that with free methods.

In fact, you are losing money by using these free methods by the OPPORTUNITY COST of using up this time.

Realistic Expectations

I struggled online for quite some time. (A few years.)

However, a few weeks after I stopped going to forums and buying ebooks, I started making money.

I made this money by having a dedication to making paid advertising work… and I did it.

In my personal story, I put about $2,000 into a campaign before it started making me consistent money. However, I didn’t just lose $2,000. I had made back a lot of that over the course of spending the $2,000, so in reality I probably lost more like $500 before it started bringing in money.

So it cost me about $500 to learn how to take a campaign from nothing and make it profitable.

Since then I’ve done this too many times to count. The more you wait to do paid advertising, the more you are losing.

If you want freedom and autopilot income, stop being afraid and start spending money.

A Brief Course On How To Start:

I recently sent out an email to my subscriber list about how I took a campaign from absolutely nothing to profit. Here are the steps I shared in the email.

Step 1:

I asked my affiliate manager what was consistent and doing well for the past year.

He told me dating, and pointed me to a few of the top offers.

(By the way, the network I’m using for this is CashUniversity.)

Step 2:

I did some research into what was doing well with dating campaigns…

I went all over the net and copied every dating banner I could find.

Eventually I had a folder full of about 10-20 banners. I made a few of my own banners as well that were based off of these other banners.

(Copy what works!)

Step 3:

I found a traffic network that had a lot of 18-30 year old men on it… this is the perfect demographic for the dating offer I had picked.

This step is all about finding the traffic to match the offer… there’s traffic everywhere.

Oh, and I’m not talking about Bing or Adwords or Facebook. This is display advertising with banners on websites.

Step 4:

I put up the banners I had in my new banner folder and linked them all directly to my affiliate link.

(That’s right – direct linking STILL WORKS. No pre-sell or landing page here.)

Step 5:

I sent about $500 worth of traffic to my banners. I brought in about $250 from that $500 – so I lost $250.

(Or, as you should learn to see it, I spent $250 to test.)

Step 6:

I looked at my statistics to see which banners were bringing in conversions and which ones were not.

(I use Prosper202 for my tracking.)

Step 7:

I paused all the banners that weren’t working, and put another $500 in the campaign.

Step 8:

I watched as that $500 turned into $1,000.

Step 9:

I now just check my stats daily to see how much I made and occasionally put up new banners.

AND THAT’S IT!

This campaign has been going solid without me touching it much at all.

That really is ALL YOU NEED in order to build a profitable campaign. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.

Remember, you can do this! All you need to do is start.

~ Avery

Avery Berman is a direct response marketing specialist who’s been in the affiliate industry for over 7 years. He also has a free tutorial on how he made over $10,000 in 16 days at http://RIFOUMethod.com