Is Print Advertising effective for web site promotion?

I am a webmaster of a dating site www.rudate.com an looking at different options to promote it. We're currently working on re-diesigning it and looking at different options of promotions. Online advertising is fairly cheap, compared to other means of advertising, but it seems over saturated with "dating" sites for us to really be noticed.

One of ways we though may make a difference is print advertising in local newspapers and such. What do you think, will it work?

The site generates no profit at the moment, so our solution would have to bee on a budget, we're open to suggestions as well.

Thanks for your input.

 

You may also want to look into some PR (public relations). One newspaper article can be worth a lot more than advertising of any kind. But the print advertising is good too. If you plan to do it yourself and you are not a designer, you may be throwing your money away though so plan it out carefully and exhaust all your free online options since they don't cost anything. Good luck.

 

These guys - www . cupid . com - are using local radio stations. They purchase unused inventory and can get 30 second spots for as low as $3.00 .

Their ads are well produced. You may want to add that to your list of options.


-jay

 

I do alot of print advertising for a jewelry store client of mine, we use postcard mailings with redemption codes so we can track and we do very well on a local level and it truly results in increased visits to our site

 

On a local level I've done well with print advertising and press releases but then my site is for locals.

 

Wow! Thanks for such a quick response guys. Seems to me that's worth a try, I especially liked the radio one, I didn't even think about that. Those specific examples really do help a lot. Also if you know of a good place to start print advertising. Our goal with print was to target 8-10 major US cities for starters one at a time of course to see if it's worth the money.

 

Print advertising is more expensive and harder to track than online advertising, but you will definitely reach a broader market.

 

It is more expensive but it's not any harder to track if set up properly.

 

Care to expand on that?

 

Have you tried adwords, senexom?

 

You can use a separate phone number to track ads or you can include a referral code or URL that must be given when a respondant calls/logs in.

 

There are lots of ways it can be done.

One of my favorites has been to set up a password protected page on one of my sites. the mailing goes out and includes the url as well as the password. The copy in the mailing emphasis the recipient is part of select group, blah, blah, blah and that's why they are receiving a password.

You'll know every visitor/sale made from page is a direct result of your mailing. Not only that, but you'll be suprised at how long people continue to access that page with the password. People will e-mail it to their friends and family, tell people they know and in some cases post it other places on the web that they visit. I've done local mailings and had people accessing the password protected page from other countries...6 months later

 

Both of those work well too. The seperate phone number is also one of my favorites.

 

I have tried AdWords, and similar Overture service, they were successful in bringing people to the site, but conversion wasn't all that impressive. I would run out of money from clicks fairly quickly w/o achieving that many new members.

I would like to target the kind of crowd who would be interested in filling out a profile. My advertising budget gets wasted fairly quickly. This is partially because other dating sites offer more (services, selection), and we are working on expanding the services that will be offered, but we are having hard time expanding our member base, even though our service is 100% free.

I think exposure should do the trick.

 

you can try offline advertisements if you want.

most of these dating sites are aggressive in their online marketing only, so you may stand a chance

 

You know, when I started the forums at outshine.com, I didn't have any trouble with people filling out the profile (it's not a dating profile, BTW, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison). It turns out that's just because I was dealing with fairly technical users.

I got surprised when I did the forums at publisherdatabase.com. People complained about the profile, especially because it was long and didn't clearly show which areas were required. So people labored over the whole thing. And since the profile is needed to set up an account, you can imagine that people bailed out. However, it was the same standard phpBB profile form that was just fine on outshine.com.

It turns out that I was merely hitting a different audience, with different skills and interests. So, from April until now I've been simplifying and refining my approach. My two hints would be as follows. First, don't bother them with everything up front. Don't even put it all on one page. It overwhelms people and they give up. Get core data that can enable them to do most things. Keep it short. Then, tie all the rest of the bits of data to the extra features. For example, I think here at DP, you can't do signatures for the first few posts. So even if you wanted to, you couldn't complete your profile in one fell swoop. Things happen in steps, and as people get sucked into your site, they'll give more.

But second thing I learned was that you need to give people reasons up front for the time investment. You might think "but I'm giving them a service!" I thought that, until I looked at my numbers. Even as a freebie, too many people were hitting the homepage, but not the signup form. So... I whipped up a lot of wordy overviews and a pathetic page of screenshots. Despite how weak it is, it still helped to convince more people to sign up. Now that I know how important this is, I'm redoing it all. The new pages are better. There is no super-wordy "site concept" page, and no "screenshot" page. Instead, there are just explanatory pages for each major section of the site, and each of those has a handful of nice big screenshots.

The numbers will keep going up, the closer I get to meeting people's expectations. And I think the same would hold true for you. Make sure you have a tour or some kind of overview that explains the payoff. Make it short & simple. Satisfy people's curiosity, and they should stick around. I know my numbers get better and better the more I work at doing just that.

-Tony

 

Tony you have a good point, although my registration is fairly straight forward, I think it could improve greatly. All I really need from my user is their screen name, password, email and birth date to get their age, and the rest can be optional until they get around to it.

Thanks.

 

put the url on all business cards... actually on anything that gets printed imo

 

Who doesn't put their url on their cards? It's almost as standard as a phone #.

 

I would, also, suggest checking out basic cable rates. I haven’t looked at them in a while, but I know that you could get a 30 second local ad starting at $18 and getting even cheaper if you bought more air time or didn’t care what time it aired.

Depending on what area you are in often times you can find people trying to make a start in video production that will shoot your commercials very cheaply or at no cost. Just be careful with the people you pick. I think poorly acted commercials with low production values actually do more harm then help.