I wonder if it's a good idea to spend some money to be listed in Yahoo or to pay for listing in Overture? Is it better to spend all my money just for ads in web hosting directories?
What was the best paid advertisement you've made?
My budget is around $100-150 a month, I know that is not enough for a good campaign, but I'm going to invest almost all my profit in ads once I get any :D.
Please advise.

Thanks,
Peter

$100 is a big investment for me.

nba2003,

I need answers to my questions and I don't think that your reply helps me a lot. Anybody else?

$100 is a big investment for me.

My experiences have shown that if the budget is low, really low then you must work smart!
There are a few very good ways to build traffic.
1- You need to focus on a subject that you believe will target the prospect you are looking for.
Not just someone looking for hosting!
In other words who is your customer?

Is she a first time webmaster, the experienced webmaster looking to place her new customers, What do they do for a living, where do they hang out online?

#1 you must know who your customer is! You can not sell to the whole world. That is to general. The dot com’s tried it, billions worth!
You will advertise until your fingers bleed and you will get conversion rates of 1% at best.

If your target audience is female (50% of all surfers).
And they control approximately 80% of all shopping dollars.

Then you must target her. But even that category is too large.
Do you want women that work outside the home, or maybe the stay at home mom between the ages of 18 and 30.

Many people may say I don't care who my customer is, I just want the money! Yes but how do you let them know that you identify with them, how do you convey to them that you have the answer to their problem?

So, pick an audience an audience, and learn what the want!

Now for the impatient, Go to aol (something like 25 million customers) approximately 30% of your traffic, and write a few articles.
HOSTING HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER FOR STAY AT HOME MOMS!

or what ever. Just make it interesting. Go to aol and read some articles, look at the ones that have been chosen the most,. Why are they chosen more etc....

Do not spam the letter or try to sell she will loose respect for you.

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#2
don't waste your time with banners!

#3
If you really want traffic study the pay per click. (I just heard all you go, what!) that costs money.
Look, it is almost impossible to get to the top in a search engine within that category you are in "hosting" and most of the branches, reseller etc...

So buy your way to the top.
This is the perfect model for new webmasters and marketers because you look for words (almost always combinations) very rare you will afford or want to bid on a single since 80% of keyword searches are 2 word phrase.
So now you have a list of all your key words and you put them together as your prospect would to do a search. ie: reseller hosting.
You look at Overture (the big one) for your key word combos to see how many people are searching that combo. If it is a few thousand it is targeted enough. But if it is 1,87878,00 then this combo is too general.

Now what is the bid on that combo. Now look at the #4, 5, 6 spot and bid for that, it will save you quite a bit until you get going.
Learn how to write exciting, curious headlines and descriptions. After all this is what you read when you do a search.

Now it costs 20.00 to open an overture account.

And you only pay for visitors.
You want a site that offers content in the subject you are offering.
You can get literally thousands of customers to you overnight, this really is not the problem. TRAFFIC IS EASY TO GET. YOU HAVE BEEN FOOLED.

The hard part is conversion. Turning visitors into customers.

Last word: you must track each and every customer, you will fail if you don't know where they are coming from and how many buy, how many look at two pages, what pages do they never look at etc.......


Thank you for being patient..

Craig Perry

I think that the main thing is to focus on your market.

Don't advertise that you carry Dedicated Servers for $99 to FarmersUnited.com (I always say this)

Anyway,

I personally like FindSp.com they are great and have great pricing.

Remeber that advertising only brings your Visitors.....Its your job to turn them into customers.

Thanks Craig!
Exactly in the target, thanks!

Peter

My experiences have shown that if the budget is low, really low then you must work smart! ...

Craig thanks for the great advice!
I got two more questions.
In your opinion it doesn't worth it to pay $200 to be listed in Yahoo?



quote:
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You look at Overture (the big one) for your key word combos to see how many people are searching that combo. If it is a few thousand it is targeted enough. But if it is 1,87878,00 then this combo is too general.
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How to find how many people are searching for my phrases in Overture and other paid search engines? This is not clear for me.

Thanks for your help,
Peter

This information is a highly guarded secret, but I'll let you in on it.

Open one browser to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Open another browser to
http://www.overture.com/

In browser 1, search for terms to bid on.
In browser 2, see how much it will cost for those terms.


Like another person said, try combinations of words that still get searched for but have a much much lower bid price.

I.E.
Web Hosting - 617344 Searches

Top bid is $7.81 per click!!!!

To get on the bottom of page 1 you have to spend more than $1.30 per click.


Cheap Hosting - 12477 Searches

Top bid is $2.05 per click. A much better value than paying $2.05 per click for the search term "web hosting" and being in the middle of the page (#16).

To get on the bottom of page 1 you ONLY have to spend more than $.20 per click. To get #16 here you only have to beat $.90 per click

Sure the term "Cheap Hosting" doesn't get as many searches as "Web Hosting" but what would you rather do - Spend $150 to get 22 clicks for a term that I bet 75% are looking for FREE hosting or spend $150 to get 75 clicks from people that are looking for "paid" hosting that they are expecting to pay for? The choice should be obvious.

And if you're really savvy you'll write a script that does this:

1. Allows you to enter a term.
2. Finds out how many times that term was searched for.
3. Finds out how many times similar terms were searched for (the listings below/above the term in step 1) - with a range, say no terms below 5,000 searches a month.
4. Searches for those terms in overture.
5. Parses the bidding information and presents you with a report of what key words cost how much as well as how often they get searched.


Anyone written a script like this? :D

Hope my answer is not too late. Check out the google's text based sponsored links for just 25 cents per click or something. Once I have some budget I would love to try this for many reasons.

a) I love google :)
b) Text based links work better than banners
c) it would be based on clicks not on impressions (so result oriented)
d) your link will appear only on certain "keywords"

hope this helps,

Another place to look is www.goclick.com They currently get over 70 million searches a month. I've been an affiliate of theirs for over a year (I send searches via textlinks/and or a searchbox to goclick and get paid for them).

You can convert your affiliate earnings into keyword listings. I did that with $20 and had mixed results....but I was linking my bidded terms directly to other sponsors (which I later found out shaved hits, shaved signups, etc..). But their interface panel is pretty straightforward and easy to use.


RE:massod

Of course the best option would be to optimize your pages for google and get free clicks. Again the overture search term page comes in very handy here. You know there's going to be fierce competition on google for the term "web hosting" so it's almost useless to optimize your pages for that term and expect a top 10 listing (unless you're a search engine PRO). However, optimizing your pages for some of the lesser searched terms could get you a top #10 spot which will bring in lots of free traffic.