Are you looking for a way to get more visitors to your bead or jewelry website, but you can’t afford the big bucks for advertising? Me neither, but I have been able to find a way get to my sites on Google, MSN, and Yahoo without breaking my bank account.
As you may know, most of the major search engine have what they call “Sponsored Ads,” which means those sites have paid for the listings at the top of the search engine results. It’s also known as pay per click (PPC) advertising, which means you only pay for the ads if someone clicks on them.
Each of the “Big Three” search engines have their own programs, and they are pretty similar, with some slight differences in how you manage your advertising on their sites. Google’s is called Adwords, MSN (which includes MSN Search and Microsoft Live Search) is named the MSN AdCenter, and Yahoo calls it’s program Yahoo Search Marketing.
With each of these programs, you go to their sign up page, open an account (which usually costs about $5.00), and set up your advertising campaign. First, you write a short ad for your campaign, which is what visitors to the search engine will see in the sponsored results area. Then, you select the keywords you want to “bid” on, which means that you choose words and phrases you think people will use when searching for things that you offer for sale. Bids can range from .05 per click to several dollars per click, so it’s a good idea to do some research on popular keywords before making your bid selections. All of the programs offer tools to help you find good keywords, and they also give you spending estimates, so you will know how much on average each keyword will cost you per month.
Alright, here’s the good part you have been waiting for. All of these search engines offer promotions and codes frequently that will give you free credit to try out their programs. Right now, MSN is offering a free $75.00 credit when you pay $5.00 to sign up, and Yahoo is offering a $25.00 when you pay $5.00 to sign up with them. To get in on these deals, you just need to go to this Squidoo page, and find the Yahoo or MSN banner. If you click on the banners, you will be taken directly to the sign up page. Once you are at the sign up page, don’t forget to copy down the promo code listed on the page (they are near the “Sign Up” buttons), because if you don’t enter it when you sign up, you won’t get the credit!
This deal is available to anyone, not just bead and jewelry webmasters, so feel free to pass the word and the links along to anyone you think might be able to use the free advertising.
Click here for the links to the Free Credits For Yahoo and MSN Search
