The 5 Most Profitable Places To Advertise Online Today For Off-Line Small Businesses

(Expert Armand Morin sheds some light – is this even necessary??)

The way businesses advertise has shifted more radically and more dramatically in the past 10 years than perhaps the entire history of advertising.

Consider this:

1700s – Newspaper advertising first starts appearing

1880s – Direct mail began appearing as catalogues in the US

1906 – The first business directory is published in Australia and later grows into the Yellow Pages

1920s – Radio advertising becomes popular with the advent of radio soap operas

1940s – Television commercials first start appearing

Over the last 10 years however:

… Google has replaced the Yellow Pages.

… Australia Post is struggling to stay afloat because of email and social media.

… Newspapers have lost huge revenue to online advertising.

… And there are now teenagers running YouTube channels from their bedrooms getting more viewers than the most popular shows on network television.

There has been a dramatic shift in the way businesses advertise today and it has all been to online.

So where are the most profitable places for offline small businesses to advertise online today?

We asked Armand Morin, regarded as one of the most prominent Internet marketers in the world today.

Meet Our Expert – Armand Morin

Armand has sold over $100 million online since 1996 (it’s more but he stopped counting five years ago). While he has clients doing millions of dollars online, he has a considerable number of clients offline as well.

For example, he once helped a struggling dairy farm transform their marketing online. They quickly sold out their milk and were able to charge $2 more than other milk suppliers.

He helped a business consultant increase his revenue by 10-times by marketing online.

And Mark Pincus, one of the co-founders of Farmville, was actually one of his platinum clients and got advice how to grow Farmville from Armand.

Question: How did you get started online?

Armand Morin:

I started online back in 1996. I had just sold my first company and was looking for something new to get into.

When I got online you had to actually type in to a message board, so it was really kind of weird back then.

Back then there was Yahoo and that was it. And Yahoo was only a directory of links back then, it wasn’t the search engine it is today.

So when I first got online I began collecting bookmarks on everything that you could possibly imagine.

If it was free, I bookmarked it. I ended up building a huge list of bookmarks.

Then one day I had an idea that maybe people would want to buy my bookmarks.

So I created a very crude website, today we call them membership sites, selling my bookmarks and charging $110 a pop for access. Now again this was 1996, just keep that in mind.

So I will just come out and say it, I spammed pretty much everyone on AOL, business boards and forums, and the first day got 100 sales.

That’s $11,000 in my first day. I couldn’t believe it.

So I continued hitting everyone I could find and by the end of the first week I had something close to 1000 sales. That over $100,000 in my first week.

I ended up doing $4.2 million dollars over the next few months just selling my bookmarks.

Then I got a phone call from my merchant account company who told me I was processing too much money and took my merchant account away.

They also froze my bank account and took out $2 million dollars too. And they held it for another 6 months.

I had just paid out some partners around $2 million to promote my site so all of a sudden I went from self-made millionaire to having no money.

It was tough but I bounced back quickly enough and quickly moved into selling products and services online.

Question: How did you get started online?

Armand Morin:

While I mostly market digital products online, I actually work with a large number of clients who own offline businesses.

And with offline small businesses, we are seeing the best results with:

These areas will give you the biggest bang for your marketing buck online if you are a small offline business.

Question: Why Use Paid Search For Offline Businesses?

Armand Morin:

I really like the search engines.

On Facebook for example we get around 0.1 to maybe 0.5% click throughs and those are my great campaigns.

But on the search engine 2%, 3% 5% even 10% is very standard. The reason is because people go there specifically to solve problems. As opposed to Facebook where people go to socialize.

I highly recommend starting with Google.

As you may know Google started coming down hard on marketers a few years ago and most just said, “Screw you. I’m going somewhere else.”

The problem is where are you going to go because they basically control the search engine market?

So start with Google and if you have already tried Google and lost your account, go back with your tail between your legs and get your account back.

Get a new one, whatever you need to do. Just get your account back because Google is the greatest and most targeted traffic in the world. Otherwise it is like saying, “Let’s ignore 60% of the web.” You can’t do that.

Bing is really easy because you can do anything you want. But you just have to figure out their mechanism because sometimes you can get one cent clicks of really targeted traffic and then other times they don’t give me anything. And there is no rhyme and reason why.

I like Yahoo and Seven Search as well.

In a nutshell, anywhere that you can get your ads into a search engine type of format, those are the place you want to advertise the most.

SEO is tough and takes time that’s why I would just start with paid ads on search engines.

See Armand Morin Live In Australia

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Question: Why And How Should Businesses Advertise On Facebook?

Armand Morin:

I’m a massive fan of Facebook and the reason is because you can raid your competitor’s customers.

What I mean by ’raid’ is that you can target your ads to people who like certain pages.

So for example I can go to Matt Bacak who is in the same space as me and advertise my products to people who like Matt Bacak on Facebook.

Now Matt is a friend of mine and we both know each other. I also know he advertises on Facebook to my followers.

At the same time I know his followers would probably be very interested in what I have to sell.

So it’s like an instant list and I think for many people it should be attractive to them to want to be able to do that.

I mean imagine being able to advertise to your competitors customers. That’s very powerful stuff.

Now what you need to understand is the key to making Facebook ads work is your targeting. Often when a campaign fails it’s because the targeting is too broad.

So on Facebook I don’t use a generic term like marketing or internet marketing or anything like that. I will always target people who like specific companies first and the reason is for me that is the low hanging fruit.

That is where you are going to get your highest conversion because you can absolutely predict what type of person that individual is.

Question: You Mentioned High Traffic Blogs and Forums. How Should Businesses Advertise There?

Armand Morin:

One of the easiest things that you could do is I think one of the most underutilized aspects of marketing is guest blog posts.

Bloggers are desperate for fresh content and are happy to publish your articles if they are good.

So go to blogs that have the traffic that you want, offer them specific articles on a topic that you know that their readers are going to want, and you will get a free source of highly targeted traffic.

Search engines love blogs, it’s a great way to build links back to your site and you get to position yourself as an expert to your audience.

Best of all blog posts rarely get deleted, even if they suck. And people are always looking for new content if it is good.

And there’s another side to this as well.

Those same publishers may be running Google Adsense ads on their sites for revenue.

These sites rarely make more than a few bucks from Adsense so if you offer them $10 to $15 to put your banner ad on the site for a month, they will often take it.

You get super cheap traffic and it’s super targeted.

Question: Why Should Offline Businesses Market On YouTube?

Armand Morin:

Marketing on YouTube is relatively new, at least if you are a small offline business.

But let me tell you we have experimented a lot with video on YouTube and its produced some amazing traffic.

It took a while for people to jump on to Facebook marketing but now it is really taking off. Everyone is doing it.

YouTube is where Facebook was a few years ago so it’s a great time to get onboard.

For us, we are getting amazing results by optimizing videos to rank highly for keywords on YouTube.

What I mean by that is when someone enters keywords into YouTube to search for a video, we want to create a video that ranks #1 on the results page.

And we have worked out a strategy to get our videos to the number #1 position pretty quickly on YouTube most times.

It doesn’t work every time but when it does it sends us huge amounts of targeted traffic.

By the way, I’ll be revealing this strategy at the National Business Forum in your neck of the woods shortly. I’ll also be doing a live demonstration to show you how it works.

It’s really powerful stuff.

Note – If you want to hear more from Armand, they can see him live in person in Australia this November at the National Business Forum. Armand will be showing business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs how to grow their businesses quickly online. Go here

See Armand Morin Live In Australia

Get early bird access now!

National Business Forum

Sydney, 14th | Melbourne, 15th | Brisbane, 13th | Perth, 12th

Click here to claim your ticket or find out more