My business relies on WOM and I was wondering if there are some places, or methods that I could advertise that would get people to my business. I do not want to spend too much money advertising. I want this to suppliment my WOM.

Does anyone know any neat methods or tricks to advertising? Please share your ideas. It would be greatly appreciated.

Travis Rowland

i would be interesting in where people get thier advertising also

All depends on what you consider cheap in terms of acquiring a customer. You can try less traffic keywords on PPC search engines like findwhat.com or kanoodle.com and go low with the bidding and get a trinkle of hits coming in, to help supplement your WOM.

I've also searched through the Overture Search Suggestion tool and found many words that the bidding is low in terms of being targeted towards words dealing with web hosting. When these words are combined you can get a decent amount of hits for a very low ppc ratio. You can also try placing a solo ad in some opt-in newsletters that goes out to webmasters. Those are usually pretty reasonable in price.

Thank you for that advice, are there any more ways that people are willing to share?

google ;)

I get a good amount of my hits from google. I found that the most common words that bring them to me are (in order of frequency): cpanel, mysql, php, free

I hope that helps some people.

Might as well do - downloads, mp3s, music, porn, warez :D :D :D That will bring them in the thousands :stickout

haha not a bad idea Crittic.

You know, I have a really good feeling that it would work! Thank you for the suggestion. Now I just need to go add the meta tags to the pages on my site :cool:

heh, i think it was a joke, but let us know how it works :)

What could it hurt? It is in the meta tags (invisible to the average customer's eye) ;)

ok i'll take your word for it :)

heh let us know how much better/worse you do because of it

hmm..

I got a google account.. and used some good keywords.. 5 in fact.. and now I get my add show each time they are typed.. typed mysql and my add comes up :)

Originally posted by nousername
hmm..

I got a google account.. and used some good keywords.. 5 in fact.. and now I get my add show each time they are typed.. typed mysql and my add comes up :)

I tried it out your right over on the right :)

i gotta question check pm

Well, that's kind of silly. No offence, but your business isn't MySQL. What if someone is looking for some MySQL SDK's or API's, if they want some MySQL applications or if they are comparing the strengths of MySQL vs SQL Server?

You have nothing to do with 95% of the queries on MySQL. It would kind of like choosing "operating system" as your keyword. Seems like a massive waste of money.

He said 5 keywords, mysql is only one of the words. His business deals with a bit of mysql and he thought that was relevant. Obviously he is doing something right if it increased his traffic.

A straight increase in traffic is not an indicator. Have sales increased? If so, what has been his cost per conversion (CPC)? I suspect for such a generic term it would be a lot higher than if he had gone with something which was actaully relevant.

Relevancy isn't just "does your business have something to do with x". After all, his business does have something to do with operating systems. You should be advertising your core business concepts. What people will be looking for.

Will people do a simple search for MySQL and hope to come up with you? Also, for such a broad term he is likely to be paying MORE than he woudl for a targetted term.

The economics of scale do not come into play here. He is paying more and getting less. Seems, as I said, a bit silly.

Obviously he is proud he "got in" on this keyword, but I could get in on the keyword microsoft if I wanted. I mean, I'm a Microsoft developer so that would be relevant, right? ...

Originally posted by Jeremy W.
A straight increase in traffic is not an indicator. Have sales increased? Exactly. Bringing in people only to have them find that your site doesn't really offer what they thought it would based on the search term they used isn't going to do much good at all. But it won't even happen if he uses the approach alluded to here:Originally posted by FloHost
What could it hurt? It is in the meta tags (invisible to the average customer's eye) Terms that are only in your meta keywords tag and not otherwise in your page content aren't going to influence your rankings much, if at all (Google, for example, just ignores meta keywords). If you put them in your meta description you might have slightly better results, but if you're looking for decent positioning on competitive terms like "mysql" you'll be disappointed if you think just putting them in your meta tags will do it.

Of course if you use PPC ads it's a different matter, but the "meta tags" comment implies that's not what you're talking about.

when i was talking about google, i meant search engine optimisation work...

just meta tags won't get you those top rankings under certain search term's theres a range of factors that google's algronym relies on that only professional search engine optimizer's would know unless you start doing research on the subject, But it does take along time and heh it can get to be a full time job since search engines almost change things weekly it's quite hard to keep up in the daily search engine grind.

Been doing it for 2 years now fulltime and you learn new stuff every day! ;)
But a google listing under a good search term can bring quite a bit of traffic. You should also consider a Yahoo! listing too =] Here's a tip for Yahoo! when submitting a description to the editors, Aim for keywords that are not that competitive in yahoo results. Eg; instead of aiming for "web hosting" which would more than likely be bloated with thousand upon thousands of results aim for a word like "website hosting" or something :) You will get alot more traffic instead of being bogged down in 20000th spot for "web hosting" and never found, When there's a chance you could be in the top 20 or so results for the word "website hosting" or something similiar.

Also alot of companies fall short of ther very own local market, I personally think you will do alot better advertising your site alot locally also if you feel theres not much competition in your area. This could range from your local community papers, shopfront windows, librarie's, local tv ad, anything!

Also align yourself with partnership's. I notice you don't do web design? Well then get in good with a web design mate or company offer them a free reseller/hosting account if they bring in client's? what's there to lose there it will benefit everyone.

Later's

You are right....

I have changed my keywords to be exact phrases.. they are now on the lines of "php hosting", "php mysql hosting", "cgi hosting", "mysql hosting", etc, etc, etc.

When simply using mysql it gets way to many impressions and not enough hits :(

Thank you, you'll do better in the long run with targetted keywords :)

Flo, to answer your question (I did in another thread in the "Running" forum), viral advertising will always outperform any other kind.