Dear Svetlana,
Many people will say that paid advertising is better because it produces better results. This is true. There are, however, two things to take into account while choosing between free and paid advertising: your experience and your budget.
As in everything, there is a learning curve concerning advertising, too, and although I'd advocate paid advertising, I'd also suggest to learn with free forms of it.
Why? Simply because you must know what is bringing results and what is not, you must learn how to structure your ad to draw people's attention, you must learn how to track your ads, and a few things more. With free advertising you can experiment as much as you wish without risking your money.
The key word here is tracking - if you learn how to track your ads, you're good to go, because you'll know the results of each campaign as it goes. If you don't know how to track your results, going straight to paid advertising can end up in a disaster - poor results and money lost.
Therefore, even if you have a large budget for advertising, start with free forms of it and solid tracking: learn what ads get clicked, learn how many clicks convert into target result - a person becoming SFI affiliate, learn how many of these become and remain active, and last but not least - project it upon your expected spendings on paid advertising to see how much you'll have to pay for a single productive affiliate.
Once you have this knowledge, you may go up to paid advertising. Let me warn you here, however, that if you are thinking about PPC (pay per click) ads, all keywords relating to earning money online are extremely expensive now, and if your budget is low, it can get consumed by just one click.
Again, however, there is a learning curve here, where the terms to learn are: cost per click, ROI, conversions, keyword, and long-tail keyword, for example. And of course a solid tracking is a must. You don't want your money get washed down the drain, right?
If you however decide on paid advertising, please do at least one thing: set your daily/weekly/monthly budget and follow it strictly. Also test, edit, change your ads to maximize your results. If you see that something does not work, stop it as soon as possible. Watch your results and watch your money.
One final remark: there are many PPC advertising companies out there, but - frankly speaking - only to of them are the real players: Google (AdWords) and Yahoo (Bing). The other small fishes may offer you lower prices, but they also produce much lower results measured in clicks and conversions.
Summing up, I'd rather suggest starting with free advertising, treat it as a test field and switch to paid advertising as soon as you are familiar and comfortable with setting up advertising campaigns and results tracking.
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Dear Svetlana,
Many people will say that paid advertising is better because it produces better results. This is true. There are, however, two things to take into account while choosing between free and paid advertising: your experience and your budget.
As in everything, there is a learning curve concerning advertising, too, and although I'd advocate paid advertising, I'd also suggest to learn with free forms of it.
Why? Simply because you must know what is bringing
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