Ok, so I'm working on a new keyword tool for my Bad Neighborhood SEO tool site (bad-neighborhood.com). The site gets low traffic now (1670 unique visitors last month), but has potential. I just keep letting myself distracted from developing it out fully. This new keyword tool should be pretty comprehensive though, and I think it will be fairly popular. So, I was thinking of maybe doing a little advertising on it once I get done. Problem is, I have little experience advertising something like this. Right now the only revenue from the site is from AdSense, and it isn't much, so I don't want to spend a ton if I can avoid it. If the tool becomes popular enough, and if there seems to be a demand, I might make a more in-depth version of it and charge a nominal fee, like $4.95/month for that version (still leaving the free one up), but that will depend entirely on the user response. So I want to do the most targeted advertising I can. I was looking at maybe getting an ad on somewhere like SEO-Scoop, which I'm pretty sure has a large SEO readership (Alexa rating of 29,308, and according to http://www.seo-scoop.com/advertising/ gets over 50,000 visitors per month), but I'm not sure what the industry average for advertising like that is. I'm not actually selling SEO services per se, but the site looks very very targeted to my audience. So, keeping in mind that the return (aside, of course, from the fame and glory of introducing an awesome new seo tool, of course. ) might not be that high, do you guys think that the $200/month they are asking is in line with what I might expect to pay elsewhere? Should I offer them less? Is it worth it overall? Any and all opinions or advice on this is appreciated, thanks! -Michael Note: Aside from 2 forum sigs, no actual promotion of the site has been done to date. It's all been word of mouth, so no clue what impact it would have on the site as a whole. Only really looking at the new tool I'm building and promoting that for now.
I honestly wouldn't spend much money promoting your site if you're relying on PPC to bring in money. So many sites were launched on the back of "targeted advertising" right before the dot com bust.. unless your traffic is huge, it's very hard to make serious amounts of money. I think a more sustainable (and more profitable!) route would be to create the premium tool as you suggested. Converting 10% of your current 1670 uniques per month would result in $800+ per month, more than you'll get with AdSense.
Right, which is why I don't want to spend a ton initially. If it takes off then I wouldn't stick to PPC for income. I don't mind spending some though in order to get a decent amount of people to the site, in order to get some opinions and feedback, etc. I'd just like it to be the most bang for the buck. Anyone here actually do advertising like this...? Thx. -Michael