Which form of advertising gets the best results, there is a case for both paid and free advertising.
Free advertising using traffic exchanges, emails, social networking sites, forums etc. tends to be time consuming in that you need to put out a lot of ads and you need to build a relationship with people to gain their trust.
All this takes time.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising on the other hand is quick, all you do is put your ads out to search engines etc.
Pay Per Click works in that when a person clicks on your ad and buys the product you are advertising you receive a commission, but you have to pay for that click.
So if a hundred people click your ad, and for example you have paid $0.25 for each of those clicks, only one person actually buys the product, that sale has cost you $25, does the amount of commission you have made cover that cost?
You have to have your ads very keyword oriented for PPC advertising to pay off, you need the keyword that is being searched for in both the ad and the sales page.
If not there is a good chance they will not complete the purchase.
If you have a good campaign running you can easily get a response rate of 5% to 10% on your clicks, but that takes time and practice to get right.
Free Advertising
Free advertising through the traffic exchanges takes a lot of time building your credits to get your ads shown throughout the network, generally you have to click an ad and wait about 20 seconds before clicking the next one, and a response rate on them of 1% is good. Forum advertising: you answer questions put by other users and put your ad in your signature file, until you have been doing that for some time and putting in quality answers, getting your name recognized, most people will not take a lot of notice of your signature file.
Social networking site advertising only works if you take time to get to know your audience and they get to know and trust you, then you don’t blatantly advertise you just suggest they look at a product you are offering.
Conclusion
As you can see from this brief outline that there are advantages and disadvantages with both types of advertising, what suits one person does not suit another.
