media buyingI spend a lot of time telling our readers about SEO and PPC as ways to increase traffic to websites. However, there is another way to get visitors to your website – media buying. It’s actually in a lot of ways a better deal than what you’ll end up getting when you go with a PPC service. Here’s what you need to know:

What Is Media Buying?

The most common way to do advertising for your website is to use PPC or SEO (or PPV – Pay Per View). These concepts are ways to make your name known all over the web using traditional advertising through pay per click (where you pay for each time you ad is clicked) or pay per view (where you pay for each time your ad appears).
Media buying actually has a dual meaning by comparison. It could mean doing campaigns on things like television and newspapers (this is very expensive though and suitable mostly for big companies who are supplementing their PPC/PPV campaigns).
However, it can also mean (and in the sense that I’m using it, this is what I mean) buying fixed ads on smaller websites. In essence, this means that you can purchase an ad on a small site and pay a monthly fee regardless of how many clicks you get for it. It is also possible to find media buying options where you do a PPC or PPV deal, but the same advantages apply.

Less Competition

Targeting popular keywords with a PPC campaign is really expensive. For example, try targeting something like “make money online” and it could easily bankrupt you since the cost for the bids is so expensive (it could easily be $10-$20 per click). However, when doing media buying, especially on lesser known websites, the competition for advertising is less steep and more likely to be cost effective.

The Price/Content Is Negotiable

Another thing about media buying is that you are able to negotiate more freely on the content that you’ll be publishing. Most site owners will accept any ad (within reason – I personally don’t allow just anyone to advertise on my sites, but I am probably more flexible than Google). You can also make a deal with site owners regarding the price you’ll pay for your advertising.

Bargain Deals

While I hate the idea of taking advantage of unsuspecting website owners, the reality is that by using media buying on smaller sites, you may well get some sweet deals on pricing because many site owners don’t know how much advertising on their sites is actually worth. This means you may get a real bargain.

You Know Exactly Where and How Your Ads Appear

With Adwords and other PPC networks, your ads generally appear based on keyword searches. With media buying, you get to negotiate on the specific location where you want the ad to appear and the specific site as well.

Plenty of Options

Finally, while the number of PPC platforms is finite, the number of websites you can do media buying on is nearly infinite. In essence, there are hundreds of millions of websites all over the web and it’s very easy to make a deal with many of them.