Hi Guys, I am still cutting my teeth after only 5 months at internet marketing - with no formal training may I add...although I have quite a bit of marketing experience from another life, and suppose I could transfer some of the skills into this game... Anyway, whats the best way to spend my monthly marketing budget of 200 USD........I could go to 250 USD per month..... Guidance appreciated, thanks....
It depends on what you have and where you are going. If you have a product, it might make sense to start an adwords campaign. If you are going to be a content publisher, it would make sense to buy links and such. If you are pushing affiliate programs, a combination of the two might work out best. What is your business?
Thanks Jf......I have already spent a bit on adwords, bought some traffic.....I am hoping that some of you guys could save me time and money through the benefit of not making the same mistakes as newbies would usually make....but I do realise of course I cant avoid the learning curve altogether..... My site is - volunteerbrazil.com
Here are a few ideas... 1. Submit your site to directories 2. Do some high-quality, high visibilty link exchanges with some closely related sites to yours that would have visitors on it that would be interested in what you have to offer. (church & humanitarian websites come to mind) 3. Launch an SEO plan 4. Do some CPC advertising on some very well targetted keywords You need to find out who your market is & then figure out how to get them.
do a bit of market research to see where you can buy ads at under their ad value and also look at how you can get free links & PR by doing other things. if a few hundred means a lot to you then you should be able to leverage many hours of research into finding out what your market wants or needs and creating it
I would say that you should chose atleast 3 word keyword phrases, so you are tightly targeted and spend it on adwords. This will be the most bang for your buck.
I would say start out by doing the normal FREE advertising. For example place a link to your site in your signature when you post on forums like these. It will give you some traffic and give you links which can rank you higher in search engines. Not that much but it will help. Also i guess write articles, personally i haven't seen any benefit from this but everyone tells me its a great thing. Ofcourse submit to as many free directories as you can find.
Write quality articles and submit to the top article archives, ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and articlecity.com.
adwords and buy content (or write it yourself)... buying content is the marketing that keeps on giving.
200USD per month can also depend on how you go about it. If you want instant impact, you may go for adwords as such, but this means you will be paying to get paid, wich is minimizing profits. What i would suggest is to invest that budget into seo. Get some highly relevant high pr links to your site, and submit to the big directories like yahoo... etc.. THis will give you good search engine positioning which will be much better than adwords.
You could submit a press release to PRWeb at http://www.prweb.com. The cost is about $85 for the full distribution and it does get picked up by a lot of web sites. Given that your site deals with volunteerism and travel, it could be very popular if written well. You can also promote it for free to my members of the Free Traffic Bar at http://www.freetrafficbar.com.
Adwords as suggested might help but it is not going to help with the conversion unless you have a good landing page. ( I visited your visit) My suggestion is try spending half your marketing dollars on a good sales copy and catchy landing pages... it need not necessarily be your homepage. My suggestion is trying to contact other travel websites for a affiliate relationship... there are many portals offering articles and information to travellers but not the real travel service... These websites are your initial targets. You may want to have a PPC or a commission basis. This type of promotion requires that you increase the default pricing in your website by a tad or offer a special discount/ add-on or gift for folks who come through your partners. ( there is a reason for this ...) you may design with your new found partner special pages or article or banner or text link... if you are confident of the value of your service... you can easily succeed in this form of ad campaigns... My suggestion PRWEB etc is left for a better day when you want folks to come directly to your website... for now you may want to promote your business through complementary websites... cheers and good luck with your campaign