::Contextual Advertising::

7 Ways To Advertise Your Business For Free:

1. Free directories: directories are perfect for customers that are searching for a particular topic. What’s great about them is that you only have to post once and they are good for long periods of time. It saves a lot of your time when you don’t have to resubmit your information every week or every month. The bad news is most of your traffic won’t come from here. I still feel it is worth it to get your link out there. Just take one day and set it aside for posting to free directories. You won’t need to do it again for at least 6 months. Go to Home

2. Classified Ads: These are great for work from home businesses. Think about it. Where do people go when they are looking for a job? That’s right-the classifieds. The only downside to classified ads is that you have to resubmit them quite frequently. Once you find which classifieds bring you the most traffic you can concentrate on them and weed the others out. So it is really more time consuming in the beginning, and doesn’t have to be later on when you get the hang of things.

3. Free article submissions/ezines: The best way to inform others about your product or service is to write an article about it. In your authors resource box, you can tell readers about yourself and where they can go to check out your product or service. This is also an excellent way to get free links to your site if you have one. There are a lot of webmasters out there who are looking for good articles they can post on their site. If they post yours, that is another site that is doing the advertising for you. All for free.

4. URL Submissions: Probably the quickest and easiest thing to do to advertise your site. Just type “Free URL submission” in your search engine. When you get a list just enter the URL you are promoting and click submit. That’s it. It only takes a few seconds and your done. Just set a day aside once every 3 months and do this.

5. Forum Posts: Put your product or service website in your signature file when you sign up on some forums. It will be displayed every time you make a post. Try to look for topics that you have some knowledge on, and can give a relevant answer too. Do not spam anyone, you will get kicked off the forum and you will get a bad reputation. Get involved asking and answering questions that pertain to your area of business. Forums are great because once you make a post it stays there forever. It will get moved to the archives eventually, but someone could still find it if they were searching the archives. Yes, there are many people who do.

6. Traffic Exchanges: Probably the most time consuming way to advertise for free, but definately the most effective. Most forums I have visited have said in many posts that they received a lot of their profit from traffic exchanges. If you don’t want to spend the time surfing for credits, you do have the option of buying them. I would look into a program that lets you surf multiple websites at once like crazy browser. There are others and they are free to download. That way you can just spend one hour a day and get all your surfing in at once. Go to Home

7. News-groups:Become involved in a group that has to do with your kind of business. You can usually mail the group once per day, but I would encourage you to find something fresh to talk about each day. People will tune you out if they see the same message all the time. Remember to never Spam anyone. Only join groups with the same interests as yours. In other words, don’t sign up for a recipe swapping group when you are advertising shaving cream.Contextual Advertising - Google Adsense Vs Ypn:Ever since Google AdSense opened up possibility to earn money as a web publisher, contextual advertising has assumed significance. Until a few years ago, banner ads were more favored. Google Adsense wasn't around, and often odds were against small businesses to place ads and get noticed. Over time, banner ads became less preferable mainly because web viewers increasingly considered them as major distractions.

Overture and Google took in the scent quite early and started experimenting with text ads based on contextual advertising. Initially the emphasis was on showing text ads in search results when a search term coincided with the keyword chosen by the ads. AdWords took shape early 2002, and though Overture was already an old hand when AdWords started, the latter galloped ahead in no time.Google AdSense is a late entrant, followed only recently by Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). After YPN debuted, there is no stopping the comparison between the two. For an average web publisher today and in coming days, it will be like 'the more, the better'. In this article, we will closely look at contextual advertising and how the competition between YPN and Google AdSense affects web publishers.

Contextual advertising - what it means?

Contextual advertising refers to those ads that are relevant to the content of a webpage in which they appear. For example, if a viewer visits a site about paintings, and the site shows contextual advertising like Google AdSense, the viewer will see ads related to paintings, such as watercolor works, art gallery and so on. Contextual advertising is dynamic, so if a viewer refreshes a webpage, a completely new set of ads appears.

Google AdSense on the cue

After overwhelming success of AdWords in relatively short time, Google AdSense came to be launched in early 2003, a program that is all about contextual advertising. To be true, eZula must retain credit of having first launched contextual advertising program way back in 2001. But it is Google AdSense which popularized the concept rapidly. Go to Home

What is good about Google AdSense is that it allows web publishers of any size to display its contextual advertising and earn money.

In comes Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)

Although belated, Yahoo launched YPN to take on Google AdSense in August last year in the field of contextual advertising. Though yet to be out of beta and still meant for US sites, YPN does appear as a whiff of fresh air in the sense that users will now have another option other than the ubiquitous Google AdSense. As of now, there is less variety in YPN compared to Google AdSense. However, YPN is said to be paying far more than Google AdSense for each click generated, which is one reason why YPN publishers are happy with its contextual advertising.

YPN versus Google AdSense

It is early days to compare between the two, especially since YPN is yet to debut internationally. Going through user experience, the most important point that crops up is YPN's generous EPC as said above. Google AdSense is more superior in ad targeting which means more click-through-rate (CTR). Ad links are shown in Google AdSense, not so in YPN. On the other hand, while YPN displays link title to show the full ad text, Google AdSense does not.

In addition to text ads, Google AdSense also allows image ads in the same format as text displays. There is however no way to know from ad statistics as to how image ads perform vis-à-vis text ads. Though necessarily contextual advertising, image ads still are a throwback to old days of banner ads. YPN does not show image ads.

Summing up, there is no doubt that contextual advertising is here to stay. As YPN evolves further, the choice between it and Google AdSense can be expected to narrow down. For the moment, if you are not located in US, yet interested to make an earning through contextual advertising, the answer is Google AdSense. Go to Home