Want to build yourself some fantastic FREE advertising on the Radio? Below you will find a report that I developed and wrote to capitalize on FREE Radio advertising!

Let’s start off in reality……. Yahoo, Google, MSN they all have a few things in common. Brand Recognition, Massive Traffic, and they do massive advertising. So now our dilemma, how do I, from my home office get the same kinds of "benefit" as the big boys?

One of our favorite activities, that takes a little time to set up, but no time at all to implement is Radio Advertising. That’s right, I said Radio! and it is FREE! Thousands of people a day listen to radio, every day either the traditional way, or streaming audio. This gives an individual thousands of chances to advertise their website, gain free traffic and improve Brand recognition, all with a single activity that is FREE.

 

Let’s talk about streaming audio. People listening to a radio station online are already sitting at their computer; people are also a curious creature. If they hear something new, or unique they WILL check it out! Since they are at their computer already, if the hear a new or unique web address; the odds are they will type it in & see what it is all about.

Now traditional listeners, if they hear the same new, or unique information they are highly likely to remember it, or jot it down, and investigate it later IF it easily remembered.

How does it work you are probably asking by now. Well almost all radio stations, on or off line accepts listener requests via email, the ones that don’t, accept them via a web-form. What we do is to compile a large list of these email addresses, and we sort these lists by genre (Rock, Rap, country, contemporary Etc.), and every day we request a different song from the staff of XWY.com, or whatever our web address is. We use our own auto-responder system to manage this list.

One drawback to this is the web-address. The web-address being promoted MUST be something easy to remember. This is crucial because people are receiving this information audibly, and you need it to be simple or they won’t remember it, thus won’t investigate.

If you were listening to the radio, and you heard a dedication from the staff of; http://www.InstantBuzz.com/index.php?i=7693.9f55f393 how likely would you be to remember the address?

What if you heard the same dedication from the staff at ShopWilson.com? See the difference?

Ok so you have a domain or address that is way too long, what do you do? We recommend the ShortURL service at http://www.shorturl.com ! The real benefit to this service is that you can control where the ShortURL address is directing traffic to, and it also provides some decent traffic reporting, and it is very reasonably priced.

The alternative to this is register a catchy domain name and either redirect it, or get yourself some hosting. This could allow you to use a single domain, but run many marketing campaigns.

Ok so we have established some needs;

• A compiled list of radio stations that accept requests via email.
• The fact that you need to separate this list by genre.
• A catchy, easy to remember URL to pace the daily requests on behalf of. (Thanks from the gang at WinEveryDraw.com)

Now how do we accomplish this? We recommend first getting your catchy or shortened URL, then locating the radio stations. Below we have provided some URLS that we use to find the stations. There are Two phases to this advertising methodology, assembling your list of stations, and making daily requests.

Phase One:
We use the following web-addresses to locate the stations we want to market to. Most of these offer the ability to geographically target your audience like no other advertising available on the Internet, and remember it is FREE!

http://www.radio-locator.com (Our favorite)
http://www.virtualtuner.com
http://www.radiotower.com
http://www.webradio.com
http://www.radioparadise.com
http://links.radio-online.com/stations.htm

The above are just a few of the sites available, we suggest you go to http://www.google.com and do a search for "online radio stations". At last check on Google, that search produced massive responses.

Please understand that it takes time to amass a large list, we will give you a hint, our daughters like music, so we taught them to locate radio stations, and save the station name/call letters, what kind of music, and the email address for requests OR the URL for form requests, thus multiplying our efforts! NOTE: It is important to record the station call letters AND their web address, you need to insert this information to personalize the song requests you send.

Some stations only accept requests via an online form. When we find stations like this, we save them in a Radio folder in our favorites, and visit / request these manually.

Phase Two:
Once you have a list assembled, we strongly recommend breaking it up into genres as mentioned earlier. The reason for this is you do not want to send a request to a contemporary music station to play Ozzy Osborne! What we have done is broken down the categories, and created separate lists for our mailer previously mentioned. This allows us to quickly send a blast to the list of each category, and they receive it as an individual email. Just think, as the list grows, you can advertise on a few hundred radio stations at the click of your mouse!

Making this a daily part of your marketing efforts will produce long term, positive results. As with anything else, it takes time and persistence to obtain the results you desire!

This activity is particularly attractive if your website you are promoting has a local appeal, We HAVE been very successful with this activity.

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Tags: Marketing //