How to Make Money with Media Buying

According to Wikipedia, “media buying” is a sub function of advertising management, and the procurement of media real estate at optimal placement and price. The main task of media buying lies within the negotiation of price and placement to ensure the best possible value can be secured. Confused? Simply put, you have a great money making product or service to promote, you get some nice looking image banners, and you try to find popular publisher sites to display your advertisement. With real time ad tracking, you find the best cost effective publishers sites to lower your ad cost and thus maximize your profit.

Many Internet marketing gurus suggest that “if” you do it right, you can turn $1000 into $5000 within few days, make thousands of dollars every day, or at least double your investment in a short period of time, and etc. They could be right, but it’s not a fast and easy get rich scheme. Buying an eBook would help you understand the basics, but just like any Internet marketing related system, make money with media buying requires one to invest in money, time, and effort. There are several components in this money making method:

How to decide what to sell?

Some people will first find a product that they feel confident and comfortable with, and then search for the appropriate sites to buy ad space. Some will find high traffic websites that offer very affordable ad rates, and then try to design a product or find a CPA offer that match those specific publishers’ niche. That’s really up to you. Popular verticals include diet, business opportunity, insurance, weight loss, dating, credit reports, skin care, body building, and etc. If you have your own product or service to sell, that’s cool. Otherwise, you can search for a Clickbank product with high gravity, something with recurring billing would be even better. Or you can try CPA offers like zip/email submit, lead generation offers, or trial offers.

Where to find targeted audience? Where to buy traffic?

It seems like SiteScout is getting very popular in this media buying business. SiteScout is a self-serve ad buying platform that allows you to manage your ad in real time. You can spend a little here and there till you find the perfect sites to display your ad, e.g. test an ad space for $5-10 to see how its impressions are converting. To begin buying traffic, you must first fund your account with a minimum deposit of $500. Cost of traffic varies by site; from $0.05 to $3.00+ CPM. Another good alternative would be Plenty of Fish advertising. The minimum buy is $25, but you won’t be able to use those popular 300×250, 160×600, 120×600 ad size till you spent over $1000.

Here is an example of campaign calculation. If the CPM is $0.1, that means you pay $0.1 per 1000 impressions. If you run 10000 impressions, you will pay $1. Now from that 10000 impressions, if you have a 1% CTR, you will send 100 visitors to your site at $1, and you are paying $0.01 per click. Ideally, you want to use a banner with high CTR so to bring your ad cost down.

Do you need an eye-catching banner?

As described previously, a banner with high CTR would definitely benefit your ad campaign. A lot depends on how you pre-sell your product offers in your banner ad, the key is to deploy a set of well-designed, eye-catching banner ads. If you need help on banner design, any Fiverr designer would be happy to help you out for $5. Or if you have more budget, get a 250×250 banner ad from 20dollarbanners for $27.95.

Some great tools for media buying

WhatRunsWhere – WhatRunsWhere allows you to search through an expansive, current database of banner ads on the web. Users can look up what competitors or related products are doing online (how they’re advertising and where they’re buying the media). $1 for a 7 day trial.

MixRank – With MixRank you can get a list of publishers for a specific text or banner ads, you can tell how long the advertiser has been advertising on these publishers, all you have to do is to export the publisher URLs and use that on SiteScout. Entry level is free.

Both WhatRunsWhere and MixRank work in a similar way, basically you can find out what your competitors are doing, and take the guesswork out of placing ads. If you can find out what is working well for them, you should probably try it yourself. Also, if you can track where your competitors are advertising, you can also find out where your competitors are not advertising.

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