NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> Online advertising on a smaller budget
ONLINE-ADS>> Online advertising on a smaller budget
Jim Dattilo (webmaster_at_findyourdream.com)
Wed, 16 Dec 1998 07:45:30 -0600 (CST)
I've seen a number of posts sharing ideas on low cost ways
to advertise online, especially for small businesses. I
agree in many ways with Ramon Ray (issue 182, vol. 3), who
said that the expense of banner ad campaigns is not always
the best idea for small businesses online. As a small
business, we've tried a number of ways to drive traffic to
our site and here's a brief timeline of our experiences:
1. Search Engine Optimization - we paid to have someone
consult on our site to get us listed higher with 4 key
phrases in the major SEs. Didn't work; money wasted. We
bought WebPositions (which analyzes a site's position in the
SEs), and do it ourselves now. We use gateway pages,
optimize, and hope. (we do have a few top 20 positions in
AltaVista, so it is possible)
2. Keyword buys through Goto.com. We bid on 30 or so
phrases (all under $0.10 per click) and saw 15-20 new
visitors per day. Over the last few months, Goto has gotten
popular, so the keyword bids are selling higher now, but we
still receive daily action from it and remain in the top 10
for all key phrases.
3. We got ranked in Yahoo and receive consistent traffic
from this directory. Like Mr. Ray mentioned, these visitors
are pre-qualified, since they are already interested in
finding content through Yahoo, then visit our site, and like
what they see.
4. We then turned to reciprocal linking. This was another
underrated traffic builder. We receive from 5 links as much
as we receive from Goto and Yahoo. We choose sites to swap
links with business content (especially small business).
Again, these visitors are prequalified.
5. We ran an expensive banner ad campaign through an ad
network, receiving 400,000 impressions over a month's time.
Not very good results, because it was a run-of-the-network
campaign, therefore not targeted, and we didn't test banners
for effectiveness. Now we know...
6. We placed a classified print ad in USA today. We saw a
spike in our log files on those days in which the ad ran,
got a number of added subscribers to our newsletter, but the
ROI was only fair.
7. Started using LinkExchange, and set up over 50 pages of
our content with a banner to maximize our chances of earning
impressions on other sites. Again, we didn't have a great
banner and click through rates were low, so we receive only
a few visitors a day.
8. Ran a pay-per-click campaign on ClickTrade, with a new
banner created by a professional design company. Luck was
on our site and visitors bombarded us. Unfortunately, we
ran through $500 in about 5 days. We've lowered our cost per
click, only accept sites to run our banner that have
business content, and enjoy 30-50 visitors per day with a
cost of around $15 per day.
Learn from this what you can. It seems that cost per click
worked best for us, since we didn't have the money to gamble
and CPC means you don't pay without results.
One other point, when visitors come to our site, they stay.
They sign up for our newsletter, and we see an increased
trend in our page impressions per day. A big part of
advertising is capturing the visitor once they arrive with
good content and site design. I think that is one aspect
we've done consistently.
Jim Dattilo
Editor/Webmaster
www.FindYourDream.com
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