Internet Advertising

The Internet Advertising Industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. When I personally got involved in this industry in the late 1990’s, I didn’t realize just how much money there was to be made. I started out very small. I bought a website and quickly realized that selling low-cost books and manuals wasn’t going to make me a millionaire. After some research, I discovered a gentleman by the name of David who was making very good money from a website similar to mine. He also sold low-cost books. However, he was also selling something I wasn’t: advertising on his website.

I very quickly started selling advertising on my website and in the first 30 days, I sold $11,000 worth of advertising. I was hooked! Over the next few years, I sold more and more Internet advertising, both on my websites as well as brokering advertising for other websites. I sold text ads, banner ads, targeted traffic, search engine submission, and paid inclusion services. During this time, I generated well over $2 million dollars in sales-- all by selling Internet advertising.

Just how big is Internet advertising? Here’s a recent Internet advertising “Success Story” that’ll shock you. A 21-year old kid, named Alex Tew, from Wiltshire, England, had a crazy idea. It was August and he was going to start at University at the end of September. To make money for college, he decided to sell Internet advertising. But not any ordinary advertising. He decided to sell tiny blocks of advertising on the homepage of a new website. He split the homepage into 10,000 advertising blocks and priced each one at $100. If he sold them all, he’d make 1 million dollars. So he registered the domain name www.milliondollarhomepage.com, created the website, and on Friday, August 26th, 2005, he launched his site.

Long-story short, using publicity and Internet word-of-mouth (viral marketing), he sold 9,990 blocks of advertising by December 31st, 2005. At $100 per block, he made $999,000.00 in just 4 short months. He sold the last block of advertising on eBay and it ended up selling for $38,100.00 on January 11th, 2006. Total, he made $1,037,100.00 in less than five months. That, my friend, is how H-O-T Internet advertising sales are!

Internet Advertising Secret #1:
The demand for Internet Advertising is HUGE and is growing by leaps and bounds!
First, it’s important to understand that advertising itself is a multi-billion dollar industry. From TV and radio to magazine and newspaper advertising, billions of dollars are spent each year to promote various products and services. The Internet has created an entirely new avenue for advertisers. Second, it’s incredibly inexpensive to start up an Internet business. Almost anyone with an idea can buy a domain name for under $10 from TheDomainCenter.com, buy hosting from HostingRiches.com for only $24.95 a month, design a website with free software, and be in business in no time. Because of this, there are thousands upon thousands of small businesses on the Internet that didn’t exist before. All of these new website owners need Internet advertising. 

Many of the largest businesses on the Internet survive mainly on advertising revenue. Take Google as an example. Google is pulling in money hand-over-fist by selling advertising on the right-hand side of all search results. These are called “Adwords” and people advertise their products and services in Google’s search listings and pay whenever someone clicks on their ad. Even though Google charges as little as 5 cents per click, there are so many advertisers, Google is pulling in millions of dollars a year with this one advertising concept. Other search engines like Yahoo also create a majority of their income from search engine advertising.

The best thing about Internet advertising is that it is continually growing. Statistics show that demand for and sales of Internet advertising continues to increase with each passing quarter. And, as more people link to the Internet through high-speed connections and as selling products on the Internet becomes even easier, I see the demand for Internet advertising going through the roof.

Here’s my own real-life success story selling Internet advertising: After selling advertising on my own website for a while, I decided to become a broker for a paid inclusion service with one major search engine. With paid inclusion you can actually get your client’s website in a search engine’s listing in 72 hours or less. I sold the one-year service for $997 and ultimately made over 1,300 sales. Do the math and you’ll see that’s over $1,296,100.00 in total sales. In fact, in one month I did over $200,000.00 in sales! And that’s just one of the Internet advertising services I promoted over the years.

Internet Advertising Secret #2:

You can actually make MORE MONEY as an Internet advertising BROKER.
When I first started selling Internet advertising, I sold advertising on my own website. While I was making good money doing this, I soon realized that there were many limitations to the amount of money I could make. First, while I did a lot of work to drive “traffic” (visitors) to my website, my site certainly wasn’t one of the most frequently visited sites on the Internet. When people pay for Internet advertising, they’re paying to have their advertising put in front of the most people possible. Since my website only received a few thousand visitors a month at the time, I was stuck selling my Internet advertising for a low price.

Second, because I needed to spend time promoting my website to build up traffic, I could only spend a portion of my time actually selling Internet advertising. A lot of my time and money was spent trying to advertise my site and drive visitors to it. And, unfortunately, with so much competition on the Internet, it became an expensive and time-consuming proposition. I soon realized that no matter how much money or time I spent, the traffic to my site had very little chance of even reaching the top 25% of all websites.

That’s when I stumbled onto the idea of “brokering”. Instead of selling advertising on my own website, I could become a broker for another website and sell their advertising! This was the breakthrough for which I’d been looking. Now, instead of spending ANY time or money trying to build traffic, I could go to an already huge website, make a deal with them to broker their advertising, and instantly have a service I could sell. Finally, I could focus 100% of my time on what was making me the most money: SELLING Internet advertising. 

I soon started brokering relationships with a wide variety of very large websites, including some major search engines. I would sell their services to my clients, pocket a large profit, and they would perform the service. It was the perfect win-win situation. However, here’s a word of caution: Whenever you broker advertising for any advertising medium (TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, or an Internet site), you’re at their mercy. If they choose to sever the broker relationship, you can no longer sell their advertising. For example, I was making a huge amount of money selling paid inclusion services provided by one particular search engine. One day, my office manager (who input the orders with the search engine) came to me in a panic about a message she received from the search engine. It stated that starting TODAY the search engine would no longer be offering paid inclusion services. There was absolutely no warning that this was coming. One day, they were offering this valuable service and the next day, they shut it down completely. At the time, we had dozens of customers
sending in orders every single day for this service and then suddenly we had no service to sell them.

Quickly, I searched around the Internet for another search engine that offered paid inclusion services. I found one, made a broker deal with them, and changed my marketing materials to reflect the new service we were providing. Problem solved, right? Not so fast! This other search engine, a month later, decided that they also wanted to stop offering paid inclusion. Fortunately, we had about 60 days notice, so we were able to transition to selling another service.

Understand that when you’re brokering advertising from any company, they have complete control over the situation. Even if you’re making them tons of money (like we were for the search engines), if they decide the advertising service doesn’t fit with their long-term goals they can quickly kill it, leaving you to rush around and find something else to sell. 

Many websites that sell Internet advertising offer affiliate programs. This can be the easiest, most hands-free way to make money selling Internet advertising. However, if you find a website that offers advertising and you’d like to do a deal with them, you can contact their marketing or advertising department and explain that you’d like to work with them. You’ll find that many websites will appreciate having someone brokering their advertising for them, because instead of having to pay you a salary, you only get paid when you make a sale. It’s a no-lose situation for the website and a great opportunity for you.