Media Buying is often talked about as being an intimidating experience and marketing practice among smaller or less active affiliates. I can tell you from being an Affiliate Marketer myself all the way up to a Co-Owner in an Affiliate Network that media buying is far from intimidating. It does take a little practice and intuition but after today you should have a better grip on what is possible.

First of all I can tell you that buying advertising on other web properties is all this consists of. There is no secret formula here. You find a website, you pay the owner, you have your ad on the website and you either make money or dont. Personally over the last year I have gotten sick almost to the point of disgust of building up domains and site properties that Google thinks are good enough to not be slapped throughout its Adwords Advertising channel. It kind of reminds me of when I had a job. I didnt get rewarded unless I did what someone else wanted. I really hate working this way and so Media Buying became an interest to me.

Now, I want to keep this short and simple. We can have all the Media Buying discussions we want in the forum but for today, I am just going to give a small dose of an easy way to find website properties for further research that ultimately could end with your ads on their properties.

I simply go to Alexa and on the right side of the site you should see a blue box labeled "Traffic Rankings". Right under the "free" section you should click on Categories. Voila, you are now presented with an arsenal of sites with tons of information regarding them.

A simple Media Buy would be to look at an offer and calculate the demographics for the offer. If it’s a stop smoking offer you could browse Alexa in the Health –> Addiction category. I dont really stop here because Alexa is very vague. With advertising rates you want to know where you can absolutely squash the living piss out of what someone charges you compared to what you make. Returns on Investment can literally be in the 5,000% ranges if you acquire the research and socialization skills needed to proceed with a successful media buy.

Things I personally do on qualifying a site from an Alexa Category:

1. I look at the traffic rank in Alexa. Today it almost means dogshit but it gives me just enough motivation to copy/paste that domain into Quantcast and Compete for even more accurate information. These sites give up a ton of information regarding the site and demographics. An absolute must in understanding the relationship your offer will play in the eyes of people visiting the sites you are advertising on.

2. How well the site is laid out and ad placement. Truth be known that most of the time you are not going to find Cost per click placements. It just doesn’t happen so much. Most of the time you are going to deal with flat service fees or pay per CPM ( per 1000 impressions). In the case that you are paying by the CPM, it is important to note that your ad placement be located above the fold. Paying on CPM basis when you are at the bottom of the page is almost (not always) suicide.

3. How smart are the sales reps or webmasters whom you contact to advertise with. This is by far one of the things you need to learn and learn it damn quick. The more savvy, serious and almost bitch-like you are, the better chance you have had nudging them into a deal where you ultimately laugh each and every month at the pathetic prices you are paying compared to the return on investment.

Get good at being savvy. Tell them you want to test how good their traffic is. Let them know that you are serious about a longterm and prosperous advertising relationship but you would like to gauge the effectiveness of their traffic. If you go jumping at first because you are excited you got the deal in the first place and lose money then you are even more retarded than you were before you read this paragraph. You absolutely want to do everything in your power to gauge the traffic and their response before paying up the full price for the term of the campaign. If all else fails then it’s a judgement call on your part.

I can tell you that it beats building new landing pages, optimizing, fighting competitors and all the headaches that comes with Pay Per Click marketing. I would not consider this a replacement but yet another advertising source to pack into your arsenal. Be sure to visit the forum and start your own Q & A thread on Media buying and we will jump in there with personal examples and case studies of what we have done on this side of the marketing arena.