I have $5,000 to spend in advertising the two sites below in my signature, DealScans and OutletScanner. Any thoughts on where to start? Here's where I've been (with a much lower budget): PPC: some mild success Blog Posts: few visitors (probably some bad choices in blogs) Social Networking: Very little success, I just don't have the time to build up friends at each site, etc CPM: very few visitors (again probably some bad choices in advertisers) Yahoo Directory: Complete waste of $200 Do you think personal finance type sites would be a good fit? I'm not sure if it's that I'm just terrible as an advertiser, or if it's just difficult marketing a "deal" site. Users of the sites are very pleased, I'm just having trouble attracting people.
invest it all in SEO. Not with a company, but get people to do work for you on here. I saw someone offering first page google listing for your keywords for a good price last week.
depends if you are looking for traffic or links, or how you will be expecting a return on your investment. If you are just looking for targeted traffic, i would use adbrite, adengage, google adwords. If you are looking for search engine rankings, i would hire someone for seo or go to text link adds.com and buy a ton of links on sites related to your website.
Ok with that kind of money I would do an off line marketing program find out who your customer is , than target that market .....postcards , have flyers printed up , pass out , you will draw more buyers ....but you want buyers not just traffic ....take a look around where you live who needs my productes .....but on windshileds of cares , factory lots, malls , schools . get people talking ....good old grass root marketing
I'd split it into 10 niches. $500 for every website. On each website I would have adsense and affiliate offers. Hire article writers and everything else you don't have time to do on your own, or prefer someone else to do it, who might be better for that particular job. Write 50 articles for each website and let each keyword be researched (min. 20 vistors/day). On your main website push affiliate offers (probably reviews). Then you should have a blog where you would have articles and adsense. Place a link back to your main page where you promote affiliate offers in a visible place. Maybe a large graphic. After you added articles to your website and know they are indexed by google, add them to ezinearticles with your backlinks. Do a squidoo page for each niche. I would bet that each niche in its first month would do $100. That's a minimum of $1000 back. The traffic would keep growing with time and so would your revenue. You need to find proper niches and target every keyword for an article. P.S. Oh, I haven't read your question properly. I just noticed you want to spend $5000 only for those two websites. Well I will leave my reply untouched in case you find something you could use for your websites.
You just have to look for a targeted audience... try googling some blogs that's related to your site and see how many visitors and subscribers they have, then try to negotiate a price with them. But you could also do Google Adwords because you might have low cost keywords...
Thanks for all the great suggestions everyone. I've read these forums quite a bit, so I'm familiar with all the major methods of advertising. I guess I'm looking for some specific ideas that may work well with my sites in particular. Directories seemed to be about worthless in my experience. Facebook didn't give me much impressions or clicks even at $.10 per click. Does it need to be higher? I think some popular blogs are a must, and probably delving into adsense a bit more. SEO is probably a good choice, but it seems like most of that information is available from forums like this, that I should be able to figure out on my own. I guess one of the issues I'm having is coming up with sites that are good to advertise on. There don't seem to be a lot of Deal/Bargain Hunting type sites that have much advertising other than the affiliates that they are advertising.
Moron. All due respect to teenager_bvs, forget web directories. They simply do not work. Well, at least you found out the reality of blogs firsthand. Social networking can work. But why did you spend money on it? It's free. Did you hire someone? If you are really serious about this and not all talk, start off with posting your ads here, and let us critique them. Let's go from there... Once you have some good ads, the way it works is to find sites that will convert for you. It's all about volume. Advertise in, say, 50 sites, including the search engines, and make, say, $100 a month from each source, and that's $5,000. Even if you make only $50 a month, so what, it's still $2,500. That pays your rent, utilities, food, and car payment! What are your top sellers? Make ads for them first. Make money from those items, and then move on to the other products. Make an ad for each product, and then put that ad in a site that best matches the site's users who may want to buy it. For example, use your computer and gadget ads for computer and nerd sites. Then have each ad go to its own landing page. See if that converts. If it doesn't, get more critiques. If it still doesn't, experiment by directing them to the network's pages to whom you are an affiliate with. And, no, seo is not a good choice. Not even close. Everybody and their brother wants to get on those first few pages, and not everyone can. There are just so many spots, and if there are thousands vying for them.... It's the luck of the draw. And even if you are lucky enough to land high, practically all who come in from a search are tire kickers, curiosity seekers. That's the reality of seo. All due respect, I think you should work on your site more first. The pics aren't very good, for starters. The watch on this page http://www.dealscans.com/Items/3604...ssian_Diver_Collection_Blue_Watch_#4340'.html looks a hell of a lot better than the one on the homepage. Go look at Amazon's pages, for a good example of great product pages.
You can try also StumbleUpon (0.05 cents/per visitor)...it will bring you guaranteed traffic...but how well targeted is, ummm, that's another story...
$5000 is really nothing, one SEO program and it is gone, one good redesign of web page and it is gone. You really do not need a thread to ask anyone to help you spend that. Buy some good Adwords and one month down the road the $5000 is gone.