When weighing the options for online ad campaigns for the promotion we elected to pause our Google Adwords initiative and go with an ad on a couple of small blogs via BuySellAds.com.

We chose this route because our measurable ROI during this campaign is essentially zero since we are giving the accounts away. So rather than pay per click, we thought running a few monthly ads on well optimized blogs would generate the push we need while keeping the ad spend fixed.

So which blogs? We looked to our analytics for the answer. We took a look at the top 4 blogs that referred traffic to us organically – meaning they linked to us as part of a story they had written. We figure since they are already sending TweepMe.com a good amount of traffic, we should grab the traffic that they’re NOT sending to us as well. With the ads placed through BuySellAds.com, we were able to do just that. From Pelfusion.com alone we recieved a couple thousand extra visitors for less than $100… Just pennies per click.

Advertising on sites that already send you traffic works because they are usually well optimized for the same search results you are targeting – otherwise the user wouldn’t have found the page where they wrote about you in the first place.

By placing a fixed cost ad on their site you are hooking into their SEM/SEO traffic at substantially lower CPCs that bidding on those keywords directly.

In fact, external in-bound linking is one of the most important factors of a high rank on the search engines.

So how can you get a large number of sites to link back to yours in a short amount of time? Do something outrageous!

The TweepMe.com web app that we developed has thousands of incoming links from sites we’ve never read. Not because the site is outrageous by any means, but because the idea of what the site does is controversial and caused an outrageous amount of feedback – both good and bad.

The people that love the site posted about how much they love it and the people that hate it won’t stop hating on it…. That’s a great thing!

It’s great because as people blogged and tweeted their opinions, they left links back to the site along the way – usually keyword laden links like ‘check out this site that gets you thousands of Twitter followers’.

Search engine algorithms can’t yet decide the nature of a link (if it’s positive or negative), only that a link exists. So whether good or bad, it’s ALL good.

Whether you have to skydive for charity, or swim the English Channel – doing something that sticks out in peoples’ minds will prompt them to spread the word.