Advertising your store?

[MJP]

Hi all,
Why is it so difficult to advertise online? I have tried adwords, yahoo, many other less known ways as well. Its so expensive and after all the attempts, nothing seems to help. I could see maybe a nice flash ad on Yahoo homepage, but the price of that is insane and well out of our budget. I have gone the free route also, like posting the site on newsgroups, forums ect... with not much luck. Just wondering if anyone has found some way of advertising that has helped your store out?
Thanks,
Mike
www.chowardcompany.com

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Advertising your store?

Well, this begs a lot of questions.

What adwords did you try? How much is where they? Why did you select them? You also didn't say what the result was? Was there any increase in traffic (but not sales)? That means two completely different things.

I've never heard of posting to newsgroups has having any effect, but a few well chosen forums where you participate, can be good.

It seems you have a product with 'character' therefore, i'd suggest trying to promote the character through participation in social sites that might also target your demographic. Either through product placement or sponsership.

Also, I'd suggest offering a sampler package at an attractive price to consumers and perhaps even free to qualified retailers.

If you like to discuss other marketing approaches, PM and we can setup a time to chat.

[Red Flare]

Re: Advertising your store?

Also take a look at this post: http://blog.mivamerchant.com/53/10-t...g-on-a-budget/

It contains our experience to date. I wanted to add the following:

11. Talk to relevant forum owners about creating a contest that they announce. You will provide an item or service to give away to the winners. In the meantime you will get a ton of traffic and good publicity.

[Biffy]

Re: Advertising your store?

AdWords and other PPC channels are upside-down advertising in that advertisers bid the prices as high as they can go instead of forcing ad suppliers to bid prices as low they can go.

Because of this it requires a different mind set to make a profit in PPC. It also requires excellent detailed data to guide decisions and audit the results of the decisions.

PPC advertising is an iterated multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma game where defections dominate. Mutual defections lead to reduced payouts but avoid total loss. Using a modified Tit-For-Tat strategy will give you the edge and help make PPC profitable.

Advertisers could all be far more profitable with mutual cooperation (everybody bid 5 cents), but that's never going to happen in a system whose equilibrium states are all dominated by defections.

It was already known in the 1950's that the game was dominated by defections. By the 1980's Tit-For-Tat was proven the optimal strategy for the iterated Prisoners Dilemma. Please note that Prisoner's Dilemma is cited in the research papers on Google AdWords.

Google knew exactly what they were doing when they designed the AdWords payoff matrix.