This is a follow-up on my expanding a successful offer post. This is a way to move beyond PPC, by purchasing long term ads on websites in your niche. There is some work and risk with this method, but the rewards can be great. Basically you want to find related sites for the offer you are promoting, and offer to buy ad space directly from the site owner. There are many ways to find the sites. Usually I just find the top 25 sites in the SERPs for my main keywords and then manually review them looking for the best fit. Once you have a list of the possible sites, you have to compose an actual email to the site owner with your request. Be nice and personable; try not to sound like you are just inserting their info into an email template. I have also found people respond more often if you offer a price right off the bat. Of course you will have to research the site’s traffic, rank, and popularity to come up with your estimate of the amount of clicks you think you could get from the site. I like to figure an estimated CPC and work back up from there. Once you negotiate a price and time period, provide the site owner with a creative which is usually a banner ad. You can pull these from your ad network’s creatives for the offer or make your own. Be sure to track the traffic with its own subid so you can see how it converts.
This can be somewhat risky. Unlike PPC, where you can pause your ad on a moments notice, once you buy an ad you are locked in for the term. On the other hand, sometimes you can find a goldmine of super cheap traffic. Like anything, you never know until you test.
And there can be the added benefit of getting a bump in your organic rankings for those pages… just don’t tell Matt Cutts
This technique can be especially effective with blogs outside of the Internet Marketing niche where people aren’t as aware of the value of a link – blogs where the audience is particularly passionate about a specific topic that your product is for.