Guest Post: How To Start Your First Media Buy

This post was written by a good friend of mine and one of the best media buyers I know Max Teitelbaum. He owns WhatRunsWhere and has previously offered to write a guest post on the subject for you guys, but with all the buzz and relevancy of his new WhatRunsWhere tool I requested he write a post that mixes the two using his own experience. I shouldn’t forget to mention that WhatRunsWhere was programmed/partnered by the great and very familiar face SlightlyShady. I’m a paid member myself and its not a product I think should go without some sort of beginner guide to make it complete.

My name is Max, I am one of the guys over at WhatRunsWhere.com, we offer the premier online media buying intelligence tool. What I’m going to attempt to do below is teach you how to start media buying on display inventory (banners) with a small budget and little risk.

Media buying is one of the hardest channels of marketing to get into. Usually to do media buys through large sites or networks, you have to shell out quite a bit of cash (usually the 5-10k range to get your foot in the door), but I’m going to show you how to test with a small budget (low risk) and find out what’s working for anyone that wants to get into this highly lucrative space (mo money!). This is how I personally got started media buying and how I scaled my first media buying campaign (it blew up and made me a fair amount of cash). I’m going to talk about two traffic sources that are low risk and can get you in the door and profitable on media buys fast, adbuyer.com first and Sitescout.com secondly (this may be a bit long just warning you guys) – plus a small bonus for those of you that make it all the way through.

The trick that most people don’t know is exchanges/resellers exist. My favourite site to start testing stuff on is adbuyer.com. I love adbuyer because it sells remnant inventory from right media network, ad networks (remnant inventory is inventory they have left over or don’t sell, so you get it at a discounted rate). Right Media is yahoo’s ad exchange platform so they have inventory from every network that uses that exchange, and allow you to target specific networks in their functions. You can do this by selecting manual targeting instead of their audience score (see image below). http://ajmalseotips.blogspot.com/