Hello, and welcome to the penultimate part of our study on free advertising methods. Today, we’re looking at good ‘ole SEM.

Now, you might look at the search engines and say that there’s only two ways to advertise with them: by being highly ranked in the natural listings, or with PPC (Pay Per Click) adverts. Well whilst those are certainly two methods, we’re going to discuss some today that aren’t so talked about.

The main advantage of Search Engine Marketing is the fact that it delivers a targeted type of traffic to your website. You can attract people interested in various fields to your website.

Firstly, lets look at what people use the search engines for. What is their purpose? To find information. When you understand this, you realise that actually, you don’t have to be anywhere in the top ten to get visitors. What you need is to be advertised on the top pages. And how can you do that? Simple - give them something back. So what can you give them? Well, the obvious answer is money. But we’re trying to do this for free. So what else? Well maybe you could become a writer for their blog. You might have noticed I have a banner on the front page of this site. I don’t pay for it: I write for it. If you’ve got a site with great PR, you might consider paying with a backlink. Maybe give them a free sample of a product to review and keep. You have all sorts of ways to get free advertising on other people’s sites.

The second awesome way to get great search engine results is to have an affiliate program, and tell your affiliates what keywords they need optimise their pages for. Give them everything you can to help them rank well, and give a good commission. That way, you’re not doing anything, and STILL getting paid, without shelling out for advertising. Run competitions every month so that whoever is highest ranked gets a prize. People will be falling over themselves to get to number one.

If you just think outside the box for a while, you’ll see that there are ways of using the engines that no-one else is using that you can cash in on now!

Get thinking, and good luck!

Pete

Related Articles:

• Chapter 1: Intro to SEO