When you want to market a product or service, the fastest way to get started is through display advertising. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed if you try to run too many campaigns. It’s best to find a product that has a good conversion rate and try to run a campaign with it. From beginning to end, here are some tips designed to help you run your first ad campaign.

Talk with an Affiliate

Before you sell your own product, try to sell someone another prooduct that is more established. Selling an affiliate product through ad exchanges will teach you the fundamentals you need to get a campaign running, and to make some money with it. Speak with an affiliate representative and ask them about campaigns that have a strong conversion. Get a feel for the kind of audience you should target, but be prepared to do your own research on the topic.

Competitive Research

You want to start your basic research with some searches about your product, and the ideas related to it. Let’s say your product is a job website. You’ll want to learn what kinds of websites the unemployed are looking at, what they are reading, and anything you can about their aspirations. Knowing, for example, which job market is hottest at any given moment would help you hyper target your searches and learn even more about your market. Once you’ve gathered some data, set up a campaign with an ad exchange.

Your First Banner Advertising Campaign

Ad exchanges sell traffic directly to you, and they let you segment that traffic based on the observations you made during the research phase. You should have some ideas on keywords you want to pursue, demographics you want to target and which campaigns you want to run. Try to limit your campaigns so you can manage the results.

Record everything you can about the campaign, including how many visits your landing page receives and how many conversions you acquire. Also note the time of day that your site experiences the most traffic, and anything else you think may be relevant. Data acquisition is an art, and it’s not always clear which points will be most valuable when you begin a campaign.

Analyzing and Scaling

Getting your campaign working, and producing good conversion rates at a reasonable cost, is a matter of fine tuning the traffic settings and advertising models you have. Try varying your keywords, adjusting for location and other variables that might help eliminate traffic from viewers who don’t want to see your ads.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the co-founder of engage:BDR, where he oversees strategic marketing and sales for the company. Ted Dhanik began his career with MySpace.com and LowerMyBills.com, where he sold engaging ads. Ted Dhanik has a degree in business administration from California State University Hayward.