I'm starting to plan my marketing strategy, and I need some help from people who have been through this before. My site is still in it's infancy, and I get about 80 unique visits a day without any advertising. I'm ready to take it to the next level... How long should I expect to spend more in advertising than I make in sales? Two months? Six? A year? I'd hate to thow hundreds of dollars into advertising each month, only to see it never convert into sales. Or worse yet, spending $300/mo only to make $150/mo in sales month after month after month. I know I'm going to be in the red for a couple months, but how long is acceptable? How long did it take for you to become profitable?
what is your site about? Try optimize your site for some natural traffic! Natural Traffic + Advertising = $$$$ (with good ROI) Any new site requires atleast $1000 to kick start! And allow atleast 1yr for a site to grow before you look for profits
Yeah, I figured it would take a while. A year seems like a good timeframe - if I can't make it work in that time, I'll know that it's either time to move on to something else or drastically change things. It's a template/stock image site with a very specific niche. So I do spend a lot of time networking in appropriate places to help build organic traffic. It takes a lot of work, but I hope it'll be worth it!
Try to attract visitors by giving away some photos free! Always make sure you have plenty of content in your site!
wow. some famous marketers would definitely disagree about testing for a year. opinions vary. You should be able to test a market in PPC in about 2 weeks. You must track the roi appropriately, something too often neglected. In 2 weeks, you should have a ball park as to what your potential is in said market. That potential is also dependent on your own skills and experience, your competitors, and its sustainability. You must factor all this in. Trying to pick the top 100 products to sell will more than likely get the inexperienced webmaster burnt. Now, regarding organic seo/marketing........for that method, a year aint long enough, imo. You like that dichotomy? Of course, once again it depends on the market and your experience. But in any semi-competitive market, for organic seo, you are going against sites that may have been around since 2002, with a PR6 or higher, and with 10,000 quality backlinks, with 20% of those (2000) going into their subpages. You are not likely to beat that in 1 year if I am to deduce your experience by the question you posted in the first place. Altho it is controversial, if you want to try to go against these big boys, it may be in your interest to consider stompernet, getting in near a time of their conference meeting, study everything you can beforehand, go there, network like crazy, learn some more from their forums, etc, and then consider if you need to stay in the monthly membership. I aint trying to promote those two guys, but if i had to start from the beginning in todays market, it probably would be the best education for 2400.00 (ie 3months or so of membership, timed near their next meeting). just my opinion.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I know it's going to be an uphill battle - and my expectations are low, so it'll be an interesting experiment. I'm not expecting to turn this project into the #1 site on the internet for this kind of content (as I don't have the time, budget, or desire to do so), but I'd be happy to get a small profit from it each month. I think I will give it 6 months to a year and then re-evaluate then. For now it'll be paid advertising + organic seo development, switching over to all seo development if it seems like I'm throwing money down the drain each month. The site costs me nothing to run (besides my time + hosting costs), so I can afford to be somewhat flexible.
OldDocks. Hey I like the photos for free, can you share a little n=more should they be like of places look like post cards?
It's hard to put a specific dollar amount on what should be spent on advertising. If you have a budget for the first 3 - 6 months of operation then allot X amount of $'s to advertising. After say 6 - 18 months if your site is generating revenues then you should work out a % of monthly revenues to put back into the growth or maintenance of your site by advertising. Just my opinion
Well, paying for advertising is definitely the fastest way to generate traffic to your site. BUT, there is always a but... You can do things the free way, this may be slower.. BUT (Yes, another BUT).. sometimes this may work out better in the long run, especially if your new at internet marketing. You do not want to mess up and spend $1,000 on your site, then find out it is not successful! Try seeing what works for you, try many things even if you hear reviews that they are not successful.. What works for you, may not work for others.
be conservative when testing out a new site. however buying traffic whether through ppc or buying traffic directly is the fastest way.
How much to spend on your site is all depends on your budget and how "urgent" you want to be profitable. If you are cash tight, just use free advertising - Yahoo Groups are pretty good - go join those really big groups with at least 5,000 members so that with just 100 groups, you will have total memberships of over 500,000 to email daily. Go join some manual traffic exchange and credit-based safelists to promote your site.
everything starts from your gross net revenue: CUSTOMER-OVERHEAD= GROSS NET REVENUE That's the only way to start from your customer on back. Then your run a lite AdWords campaign JUST for the data and not the traffic. Analyze the data, SEO for the competitive key terms, or the high search volume/low competition terms and GO HUGE.
Who knows. It all depends on how fast you can learn, and learn from your mistakes. You are going to be in the red for a couple of months? Uh, why?
norebbo, please, do NOT stop your paid advertising. First, it is unlikely that you will have the top 1 position for all your search terms ad infinitum. Second, there have been studies (dont ask me where, i read alot) that show that having a top organic listing AND a top paid listing INCREASES visits to the site and conversion. Who knows why, maybe something subliminal with repetion, or boosted credibility, or whatever. therefore, even if somehow you dominated the search engines for all your terms forever (in the top 3), consider paid listing forever as your budget and roi dictates. good luck.
If you are trying to build a true, long-term business, you should plow all earnings back into advertising as long as possible. If you can hold out for several years, do it for several years. You'll see things develop as a snowball - slow at first, but picking up speed the longer you stay at it. Your ultimate goal is to make money, of course, but the longer you can delay your gratification, the more successful you'll be, and the more money you'll make in the long run. Hope that helps.
the stealthy one, kind of like the stock market and planning for retirement. I tend to take part of the earnings for myself. hand caught in the cookie jar. but keep advertising. it really depends on your own temperment and goals. if you plan on selling the company, then dollar sales is important, therefore plough it all back in. Also take what stealthy one stated in balance........just because you are spending all the money and have lots of sales, doesnt mean you shouldnt try to improve it. For some words on some days at some times, it is better to spend more money for a search term (it converts much higher), yet that same term, at 9pm PST to 8am PST does not convert! Therefore, you may want to spend MORE total dollars from 8am to 9pm and then turn off the campaign for the remaining, nonconverting hours. it will result in MORE SALES. almost all answers require an 'it depends'. in closing tho, as the stealthy one points out, more often than not business owners spend and do not reinvest, and that is definitely not balanced.