This article is guest posted by Style.

So, you’ve decided that you want to make money online, that’s cool but there’s just one problem. How are you supposed to compete with inferior knowledge, inferior skills and an inferior budget.

In order for a “system” that you’ve design to be profitable and easy to manage, it has to have two desirable features. a) it needs to be automated and b) it needs to convert visitors into buyers. This married to another very important aspect of Internet Marketing; the source of your traffic. Your traffic will determine how much success you have online.

There’s only one problem with descent traffic and that’s cost. The saturated arena of PPC is hardly a place to start. You’ll spend more than you make (without a doubt) and the truth is, you don’t need it. Sure it’s a good way of targeting your traffic, but there are much more cost effective ways of doing this and having the same results.

Did you know that only 5% of traffic on the internet is generated through search engines? This is a bold statement, but it’s true! 85% of ALL traffic online, comes from display marketing. You know, those irritating teeth whitening offers you see on almost every single page on the internet? That’s display marketing (also known as banner marketing or buying media).

So now you know where all of the traffic online comes from, are you sick of competing with 99% of other marketers out there for only 5% of the potential traffic out there? You don’t need to answer that because I already know the answer.

Buying media is a really good way of generating traffic and this is how it works.

Step 1 – Testing

Firstly, you’ll need to make sure that your landing page (if you have one – not required if your direct linking) is all set up and ready for testing. You can use Google Website Optimizer to do this, as well as StatCounter. This will give you a good idea of how much traffic you’re generating and how well each of your landing pages are doing (Website Optimizer is used to split test your offer).

Once you’ve done that, you may also another really valuable tool; ClickTale. ClickTale allows you to set up “recordings” of your visitors. You can watch (in real time) what they do on your site and evaluate the effectiveness of the various different aspects of your landing page, such as the copy or images etc. Once all of this is in place, you’re then ready to “flood” your offer.

Step 2 – Demographics

This is an often overlooked part of the average newbie’s marketing drills. You need to know who your offer appeals to (you’ll be surprised). Once you know who you’re targeting, you can then start to look for sites that relate to your market, product or service.

Finding out demographic data is really easy to do. You’ve got Compete.com, Quantcast.com, Google AdPlanner and Alexa.com. All of these sites allow you a small amount of demographical data, but it’s enough for a simple campaign. I would recommend getting the free SEO Tools Firefox plug-in by SEO Book.

Once you have found the sites you’re looking for, you can then start comparing the demographic data. Choose the site that has the nearest match and go with that one.

Step 3 – The maths

It’s important that you are aware of the potential earnings of your offer before you begin any sort of display campaign. You could work out (by looking at the traffic data in Compete.com) how many unique visitors a site has. From there you can work out how much money you can spend and still manage to be in profit.

You’re looking for at least a 200% ROI (return on investment) and initially, you’re going to use the most conservative figures to work out how much you can spend.

Let’s say that a site has 10,000 visitors a month. You should be able to convert 1% of this traffic to click on your offer. That leaves us with 100 people who see our ad.

If we, again using extremely conservative estimations, manage to convert 1% of that 100 into a buyers, that means you will make one sale. Now, you know, that if you sold X ebook for $20, that you can afford to spend $10 on advertising it (giving you the 200% ROI). That means that you can (in this example) spend $10 on 10,000 views.

Would you get excited now if I told you, you could get 1,000 views for as little as 5c? (No need to answer that one).

Step 4 – Approaching the sites with an offer

Now that you’ve done your homework, you know who and where you’re going to be sourcing your traffic from, and you also know how much you are willing to pay per 1,000 impressions. It’s now time to start approaching websites with offers for advertising.

This can be done in a number of different methods. You can either look for an “advertise here” link and follow the instructions, or you can contact the site owner directly with an offer. NOTE: some websites have 3^rd party advertising networks that manage the advertising on their sites for them, all you have to do if this is the case, is look near the advertisements on the page and find a text link that says advertise.

If you’re just starting out, it is advisable that you avoid the bigger sites as again saturation will kill your business, there are loads of websites out there that don’t make enough money and are always looking for other sources of income.

TOP TIP: If you find a site that only has AdSense on it, then you are going to want to promote on there. Here’s a simply formula to work out how much money a site makes using adsense.

For every 100 visitors to an adsense site, the site owner will make $1. All you’ve got to do is work out your potential profit, and try to beat the amount of money made by the webmaster of the site.

Step 5 – The Creative’s

This is the daunting part, finding the right banners to put onto the site. Luckily, you can outsource banners for a relatively small amount of money, either using the Warrior Forum (warriors for hire) or some similar service like elance.com or oDesk.com.

Make sure your banner has contextual relevance for your users (doesn’t promise more than the site can deliver or isn’t misinforming them) in relation to your offer.

Make sure your banner sticks out and ALWAYS make sure that you use different creative’s and test which one works best. Doing this will allow you (further on down the line) to have a fully automated proven money printing machine!

That’s it…

Now that you know about this secret method of pulling in traffic, it’s time you stepped out from the crowd of dazed newbie’s, stop paying extortionate prices for PPC, and start growing your internet marketing skills.

This form of advertising is the way to go. If you want more information on buying media, please visit Style (It’s Like Internet Marketing; Only Much, Much Cooler).

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