Where To Spend The Money?

[Kimberly]

For the first time this year I have made enough money I can afford a very small advertising budget. I going to start by spending about $50.00 a month on search engines place, probably buy per click. Can some of you who have more experience tell me if this is the best way to go and if so which search engine is best?

Any advice welcome
Kimberly
http://www.momsbreak.com/

[pjdv]

Check out Google and Overture.

[Tammy]

I think you need more to make any kind of impact. My experience with advertising is that a little does not go a long way, in fact it goes hardly anywhere at all. Just my .02.

[johca]

Kimberly--I've not spent a penny on internet advertisement and Stuff 'N' Baskets and gifts (http://www.stuff-n-gift-baskets.com/) and CY Technical and Professional Services (http://www.cytechandprofservices.com/) are both getting customers who find them through search engines. I’ve found the bigger advertising bag is to advertise in newspapers and the subject appropriate magazines for both sites.

[Unicorn2]

Originally posted by johca
Kimberly--I've not spent a penny on internet advertisement and Stuff 'N' Baskets and gifts (http://www.stuff-n-gift-baskets.com/) and CY Technical and Professional Services (http://www.cytechandprofservices.com/) are both getting customers who find them through search engines. I’ve found the bigger advertising bag is to advertise in newspapers and the subject appropriate magazines for both sites.

AMen..

the #1 source of advertising for me has been the yellow pages.:-)

[Tammy]

Regarding advertising in newspapers, you better have a bigger budget or be looking at some smaller newspapers. We tried advertising in some major papers a few years ago and it was not cost effective. Our experience - and everyone's will be different, so this is for what it is worth - is that print advertising for an online business is just not cost effective. I suppose it depends on what kind of products you sell. We stay online with our advertising now.

[fac3less]

Kimberly - also take note at how johca up there posts his links in almost every post! :) Also helps with search engines. I would recommend setting up some sort of 'affiliate' program that way people who provide you with links would get a link in return - or something to that effect. (or their site members and visitors get a discount at your site)

Payperclick and whatnot isn't worth it - in my opinion. You just need to know the tricks of the trade to get up there on the search engines.

Take for example 'miserable failure' ;)

[perex.com]

I signed up for a bunch of Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines. I used a site called http://www.payperclickguru.com and went to all the ones they recommended. Of those, http://www.ah-ha.com was the only one charging 1cent per click which actually delivers a reasonable amount of traffic. The other 1 cent engines took my deposit and I get one click a week. At 5 cents http://www.Google.com is definitely the best, http://www.FindWhat.com also delivers a lot of traffic (although I liked it better when they were sub-5-cent). http://www.Overture.com, in my experience, delivers a TON of traffic, but it was 10 cents minimum per click the last time I checked. I bought the term "personality test," for my site: http://www.PersonalityExpert.com, or http://www.Perex.com for short, and on Overture I can spend $100 in TWO days. I stopped doing that, partially because that burn rate is too high for me and also because 10cents per click is insane when I get more than I want from Google already at half the price.

I would love to hear more advice from those who have found ways to drive zero-cost traffic. Putting the domain name in message board posts makes sense for sure, I never thought of that before I read it just before this post.

[Ophelia]

In my personal experience, hands down, I've had more success with "free" advertising than anything I tried paying for. I'd say you'd get a lot more benefit from optimizing your page for the search engines than by paying for engine placement.

Messageboards are definitely good places to link.. whatever communities you belong to that allow you to have your site in your signature you should do it. It will definitely help.

Try to get free links from places that have visitors who are interested in buying the kinds of things you are selling. For example, if you are selling personalized baby gifts you'd want links from sites for mothers to be, baby sites, parenting sites, military mom sites,etc. If you have friends and relatives with pages, ask them nicely to link to you. If you know anyone with a blog or livejournal (or have one yourself) ask them to mention you in it. Every little bit helps!

As far as paid ads, I'd say adwords gave me the best result (not teriffic, but better than anything else) The trick I've found is to set the price to the absolute minimums and use very specific or obscure keywords.

You actually might want to consider putting up flyers for the type of baby stuff you're doing... ask to hang them or put them up at the counter of local places where moms go :)