The Internet Marketing Parasite

Today’s marketing tip is an abridged, sneak-preview version of my latest article.

I’ve called it “The Internet Marketing Parasite” because if you’re a smaller Web property, with 1/100th the cash flow of these large mondo-funded sites, one way you can still stay in the game marketing-wise is to ride on their million dollar advertising coattails!

While these sites spend millions of dollars advertising their sites to drive traffic there, you meanwhile can simultaneously buy relatively inexpensive advertising on their sites, thereby benefiting from exposure to the traffic they’ve spent millions to bring in.

Consider the following opportunities:

GoTo.com & Kanoodle.com

I’ve already mentioned GoTo.com several times on this list. For new list subscribers, GoTo.com is a search engine that allows web site owners to bid on top search result rankings. Now it has a direct competitor, too, Kanoodle.com.

Both search engines engage in heavy promotions to drive traffic to their sites (GoTo.com more so), and yet for search term bidders, taking advantage of this traffic could have cost nothing more than pennies!

Portals Duke it Out - You Get in Cheap

These days, everyone wants to be your portal of preference, that site whereto you go for all your information needs, and also hopefully the page your browser defaults to when opened. In order to gain such valuable attention, portals sites have gone to vast extremes, spending inordinate amounts of money to get you to select them. One such portal is the Disney-owned Go.com network, consisting of such properties as ABCNews.com, ESPN.com, Disney.com, and Infoseek, the search vehicle a Web surfer on the Go network will likely use.

Thing is, ad costs on Infoseek are relatively low, ranging from $14 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for 5 million to $22 CPM/1 million run-of-site banner ads, with minimum commitments as low as $1,500/month. Not too bad considering the potential exposure!

Buy It At Clearance

Here’s another angle altogether: buy heavily promoted web sites ad space on discount!! It will almost feel like cheating!

How do you go about doing this? Check out AdOutlet.com for starters. This site, which requires free registration, is a clearinghouse for unsold ad inventory of all types - print, TV, radio, Internet, even transit!

Once you login as a registered user, you can peruse their inventory. In the Internet category, you’ll find plenty of high-profile web sites who have inventory for sale at discount prices. For example, this week you could purchase ads on such well-known sites as Monster.com (remember their multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad?), MP3.com, and CBS Sportsline.

Sometimes prices are listed, sometimes it will say “Offer,” meaning make your best offer and the site owner will take it into consideration. Current inventory on Monster.com falls under the latter, though one lot was bought for as little as $3.30/CPM or $835.00/lot!!

The moral of this week’s tip? It doesn’t have to cost a lot to get great exposure if you just know who to latch on to. Feed on, fellow parasites!!

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