There has to be a way to cash in on Jon and Kate divorcing. If you look at all the major news portals. This is the big story. After releasing statements to PEOPLE magazine the story is spreading all over the internet. As a marketer what opportunities are there? It is a bad situation for this family and I am not endorsing taking advantage of their problems. What a marketer can do is use this situation to promote positive campaigns that would be of interest to fans of the Jon and Kate plus 8 reality show.

If you had a big budget can you imagine what type of traffic you could get from the PEOPLE web site alone. As an internet marketer it is our job to find worthy traffic sources and promote to those markets. Let me know if you can find a way to use this traffic source.

The way I have been advertising most of my affiliate offers has been through pay per click advertising. There are advantages to using ppc that you can not get from any other type of advertising.

When you create a campaign you can target the people most likely to buy your product or service. The ability to target your potential buyers, with keywords narrows the traffic to your site. This in mind I wanted to try other types of advertising. The cost of advertising on mainstream media was not an option. What I came up with was to advertise in the local area with a postcard. The cost was small and I had the software to design a nice looking layout for one of my landing pages.

The first step was to pick an offer and create a postcard that would drive traffic to a landing page. With Microsoft’s digital image program I designed the postcard. Once I had a mock up of my postcard I printed it onto 4×6 photo paper. The result was amazing a nice post card with little cost. The next step was figuring out how to print 100 copies at a good rate. It would have cost too much to print it out on my printer. With a quick search I found that Costco would print 4×6 pictures for about $0.15 a print. This was a great rate compared to some of the local print shops or online companies. With the final design saved all I had to do was upload my picture to Costco and pick up the order the next day.

With a 100 postcards in hand I had to figure out where I was going to distribute the advertising. Since the product I am promoting is a bit upscale I picked a better neighborhood in town. With no experience in flyer delivery I set off to drop my first postcard advertising campaign. Stay tuned for my results.

A few months ago I bought a Sony eBook reader. This has to be one of the coolest gadgets that I have ever bought. As an avid reader I love the fact that I can download eBooks from the Sony Store Online in seconds. This does take the joy out of visiting my local book store, but it’s so convenient.

The eBook reader cost me $279.99 at the Sony Store. The salesperson marked it down as I missed a sale a few weeks prior. The unit is solid it feels well made and it is very light weight. In comparison to a real book, you will notice the difference between the eBook Reader and for example a book like Snowball which is 800 pages long. The Sony eBook reader is not only an eBook reader, but also a picture viewer and MP3 Player. The sound from the MP3 player is fantastic one of the best players that I have ever tested. You can listen to music while you read, but the controls are a little odd. If Sony could have made a better interface to control the music while reading, I would use the MP3 player a lot more. The picture viewer is just an extra it has no real value as the picture are shown in black and white.The unit also comes in brown leather cover. The cover helps protect the screen and it looks great.

The main reason to buy this item was to read books. As an eBook reader it is amazing with a screen true to a real book. The ink technology used makes reading on the device very easy on the eyes. It’s almost like reading a real book. You might notice a little difference at first and pages take a few seconds to load, but other wise it very close to reading a real book. At present I have over 1000 eBooks loaded on the memory card (It takes SD and Memory Stick plus built in memory). The unit also includes software to connect the device to the Sony eBook Store and to transfer your files. The software is sort of like iTunes for the iPod. The software was very easy to use and I found the whole process of buying a book and uploading it to the device painless. This is a great device and if you love to read you will not be disappointed. The Amazon Kindle is also highly recommended as an eBook reader, but it was not available in Canada. Overall I am very happy with this device and look forward to reading many eBooks on it.

Yesterday I found an email from eBay in regards to a new PPC platform that they were setting up on their site. Well boy was I excited, to reach the eBay buyers was a dream come true for any affiliate marketer. Well it did not work out the way I planned. After setting up my new account for the program and being promised $20.00 in credit to get started I set  up my first campaign. Well after all that trouble it seems the PPC campaign can only link back to my own eBay sale or store items for sale. Looking at this it seems eBay double dipping again. They are asking me to list and item and pay fees, and then pay again to have the listing show up in other areas of their site. Well I erased the campaign that I was working on and will have to revist this eBay site another day. It might work for some items I sell on eBay so I am not going to say that overall it’s that bad of an idea, but I do wish they would allow to advertise off site and conect to url’s from my other affiliate landing pages.

If you have a web site and want to get more visitors then use Hub Pages. This is a free page creation web site. You can write pages on almost anything. If you are in doubt of what you can write on Hub Pages they make it clear right away when you sign up. This site is more geared at getting visitors to your main site. You do not want to plaster affiliate links as you will have your page taken down.  If you write a page about something related to your site then add a link somewhere in your article then that’s fine. You can also make money with Hub Pages as they offer a method to add your Google AdSense publisher ID and your Amazon ID. Overall I would say Hub Pages are perfect to promote your web sites and to share your knowledge.

Here is an example of a great HUB PAGE. This writer picked promoting through Craigslist very nice page.

How To Use Craigslist to Generate Free Traffic to Your Website, Blog or Hub Pages

Look at the Hub Page in the Link and you can see how easy it is to promote with this site.

If you are a seller on eBay then you should do everything you can to promote other offers to your customers. As per eBay rules you can not promote other offers outside eBay on the eBay site. What you can do is once you have a customer you can promote offers to them when you prepare your packages. This can be as simple as inserting a flyer with a link to another web site you have. The best use of this method is to try to cross promote offers that are somehow related to what you sold on eBay. If you can do this you will increase the number sales to your related site or offer.

Simple tools to use:

Buy some cheap business card paper, you can even buy these at the dollar stores. Then print out what information you want your customer to take action on.

You can also buy stickers or other promotional stationary that can be cost effective to lead your eBay customer to your other offers.

If you get their email you can also ask them if it is alright to send them related information when you have a new offers. This is a great way to start building a marketing list.

Customers do not mind this type of promotion and you can use it to start gaining extra sales.

With eBay you do not need to just sell customers the products you list,you can also use eBay to gain new sales for your other offers. Take advantage of this type of advertising as it costs next to nothing.

After much thought I will allow a few private advertisers on Vendingmatic.

If you need link backs to your site this is a great way to help with SEO. For less then what it costs to advertise on Google you will get a targeted audience. For full details and prices please click on the Advertise page at the top of the site.

Again another week of disappointment with Facebook Ad’s. At this point I think I have tried everything that I can to get converts. It’s come to the point I can not even give anything away for free on Facebook. Since Facebooks Ad’s are so new, I am not sure what else to change. The users on Facebook who are doing well are not sharing too many secrets. If any one has some tips to share please leave a comment. It would be very interesting to see how some of you might be doing with Facebook.

So far I have not had to much sucess with Facebook Ad’s. I get clicks, but no converts. There has only been one campaign that I had running before Christmas that did convert. Many affiliate say you need to try different landing pages in order to test properly. That idea in mind I made a few changes and will be working on some other ideas to increase conversion rates. With paid traffic you can not spend to much time making mistakes you need to figure out quickly what work and what does not. The Facebook Ad system does have promise, but it is difficult to get your ad’s approved. The kids that work at Facebook really make it difficult to get an ad running. With time I figure they will get their act together in the meantime online marketers need to do their best to get customer to buy and not just click.

In the past month I used a few different ppc networks to run my holiday promotions. These are the networks I used:

Facebook

Google AdWords

7 Search

Bidvertiser

Yahoo

MSN

From the list above the overall winner would without any doubt be Google AdWords. The most traffic was generated through AdWords and some programs had a very good convert rate which turned into sales. The next best network I found to be 7 Search. I ran a few programs only on this network and did get traffic and conversion. The slowest to get traffic and had no conversion was Bidvertiser, in order to be fair with Bidvertsier perhaps I did not set the campaign correctly. As for Yahoo and MSN I did get a little traffic nothing major and little conversion. As for Facebook some campaigns worked well other did not, I did like Facebook. The only thing I do not like about Facebook is the Facebook Police that rejects almost every ad submitted. It took me a good 10 submits of one ad before the Facebook police let me run the ad. If you are going to spend money and want to see results Google is the way to go. The other networks are great if you can set cheap bids and just let them sit there to run when your bid is the highest.