PC
This is not an online marketing blog, or anything of the sort, however my experience with promotion over the past few months has taught me a few things and given me the motive to try some new things. I thought I would share some experiences and get any advice that anyone might want to share. There are several things I have tried:
- Entrecard
- Adwords
- Adbrite
- ProjectWonderful
- Traffic Exchange
- Amazon Mechanical Turk
This is just a very informal and non-scientific review of what I’ve done and my perceived benefit to the blog.
Entrecard
Entrecard has been the best thing I’ve done with promotion. The majority of my comments and traffic come through Entrecard. I continue to modify my strategy with them, recently introducing a weekly giveaway of all my incoming credits. This just started, and I haven’t noticed any changes yet. My hope is to get my incoming clicks from Entrecard to at least 1,000 per week so I can give away 1,000 credits per week.
Traffic from Entrecard has been scattered and non-specific. There are many people that visit my site whose blogs have nothing to do about technology, and I’m not sure they really care to read my articles, so there is nothing to keep them here so long as I remain on my chosen subject of technology (which I intend to do.)
Adwords
My budget here was small compared to what seems to be the norm. They recommend setting a budget of $50/day which is way out of my league. Maybe if I were selling something this would be a legitimate investment, however with the only revenue generation on my site being some pittifully cheap advertising, I’m not about to make enough to pay that kind of budget back.
Traffic from Adwords has been targeted and has probably been the most quality of anything I’ve tried.
Adbrite
While cheaper than Adwords, I was not satisfied with the quality of incoming clicks from them. I also got rid of my Adbrite advertising at the same time since the number and value of clicks on my site paled in comaprison to Adsense. On a good day I got a penny for my 200-300 uniques, and clicks earned a penny if I was lucky.
ProjectWonderful
A unique method of bidding per advertisements and being able to quickly and easily post pay per time advertisements on people’s sites makes this a great value in advertising. For a penny or two a day I can advertise on many sites with 100-300 unique hits/day and get a click or two out of them. They have the ability to set up campaigns that searches for advertising based on a simple or complex set of defined rules. While advertising on a hundred sites at a penny a day does equal a dollar a day, I can get thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks very easily.
My one problem with ProjectWonderful is that at times they would register that I received more clicks than I actually received from them. It’s not terribly concerning since I am paying per time not per click, but I think that some publishers have found ways to artificially generate clicks to improve their appeal to advertisers. I wrote an email about this and received a prompt and personal reply with ideas for getting to the bottom of this problem. I haven’t tried them yet, but I plan to do this eventually.
Traffic Exchange
I set up a splash page without advertising links from sites that don’t allow traffic exchange and used that to accept traffic from some traffic exchange sites. Clicking on links to get links back can be a painful proposition. More than half of the pages I look at are for other traffic exchanges, and almost the entire other half are MLM programs. How a blog about technology fits in here is debatable, and the traffic quality from these is probably pretty worthless.
The quickest way to get this kind of traffic to your site is to spend a little cash. A couple dollars can get a couple hundred unique visitors in as short as 15 minutes. You must be careful not to put CPM advertisements on the page that the traffic exchange links to as most CPM advertisers have terms against this, and if you look at their side you can easily see why. I wouldn’t pay even a penny per hundred impressions for someone to see my banner who is jaded by clicking website after website for hours on end.
Amazon Mechanical Turk
This method probably isn’t too well known, but if you sign in as a worker and do a search for blog and comment you’ll find a few pages of people paying a penny or more for each blog comment. I read quite a few of these and then crafted my own to exactly describe my requirements. I still received some “great post” type comments that I had to reject, but for the most part I got some decent comments. I’m surprised how many people will look at a website and make a comment for a nickel.
Mechanical Turk has the most quality traffic for the money. Not only are you getting people to look at your blog, but they are even reading it and being forced to make a comment on it. They may never come back, but getting them to read at least enough to be able to post a relevant response is more than most other methods here can guarantee.
IS IT ETHICAL?
Here’s the burning question. All of these methods artificially inflate a website’s popularity, yet if people never look at your site the first time they’ll never return. It is important not to violate terms of service, especially with ones you use to generate revenue. If you launch a $10,000 promotion campaign with Adwords is that okay with Google because you spent money with them or because artifically generating that much traffic is okay? Just because you’re spending more (probably) than the CPM advertisers on your site doesn’t make it automatically ethical if they are paying you for junk views. The best type of traffic is search engine traffic, but even that can be artificial or junk with SEO tricks.
My feeling is that advertisers know this is the market they are advertising in, and their advertisements are priced accordingly. There are people in their employment who study these things for a living, much more than the superficial glance I have made at the issue. I don’t find anything I’ve done to be unethical, although there are methods I will never utilize again in the list above simply because they aren’t effective.
If you compare web advertising to television advertising you will find similar questions of ethics. Does drinking alcohol really make you the life of the party? Does owning a cool watch make you cool like James Bond? Can outfits turn you into a cool off-road unicyclist? All advertising promises or implies things that are untrue or inflated. Every advertiser pays money for people who otherwise wouldn’t be interested in their product or service to have the chance to become interested. There’s nothing wrong with that – it is the nature of the business.
My recommendation – follow the advertiser’s terms of service, and read them for yourself. Put yourself in the other party’s shoes and ask yourself questions like would I pay money to advertise on a site like mine? With traffic like mine? This philosophy will probably never make me rich blogging, but at least I can sleep well at night feeling that I haven’t cheated anyone.
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Companies seem to ignore the single largest online branding/advertising venue available: their own regular external emails. Why not use these emails to market the senders company?
You have a website.
You send emails.
Why not multiply your sales-staff by “wrapping” the regular email in an interactive letterhead?
No other marketing or advertising medium is as targeted as an email between people that know each other (as opposed to mass emails). These emails are always read and typically kept.
Rolv Heggenhougens last blog post..WrapMail defines 3 specific markets for online eBranding
@Rolv Heggenhougen
That’s an interesting concept. I would wonder how you would get people to send their emails like that though. There are a couple problems I see with it, especially when you try to marry personal email with marketing.
1. Free email. It’s everywhere, and it’s so good. Unless your product works with gMail, Yahoo Mail, etc. you’ll have a hard time with adoption. If it is just “like” those services then it isn’t going to be good enough. Your lite version seems to have this problem.
2. Privacy. If this works through a company email portal then your employees will be subject to having their personal email scrutinized and/or retained forever by their employer. If they are expected to write personal email with their work account then there are a whole host of other issues that will come up such as a SLA, people leaving the company who still want to get their email, or people confusing personal email as official company business.
Of course, for someone like me that’s a great point. I still send out my emails without any mention of my blog. I should probably add a tagline at least.
Although I may not comment but I do read your blog. Does it matter if a person’s blog fits into a specific category? You are interested in the traffic and the people you are able to keep here correct?
My blog has nothing to do with technology but I do have an interest in it. I currently hold a college degree in Information Technology so you shouldn’t assume that people have no interest in something just because you don’t see it mentioned on their blog.
Then again this could be a unique ploy to get people to comment =)
ImitationAngels last blog post..Black Friday = Death Friday
@ImitationAngel
Hehe, maybe.. Actually I didn’t want to call out specifics on who I was talking about to offend anyone. It really doesn’t matter the category of the blog, except that sites like Google and Technorati consider links from like sites to be better quality links. I’m just as guilty of it though. For example, some political rants I can put as comments on political blogs so I don’t mess up the focus of this blog.
I think there are some people who visit who do not read, and it isn’t fair to judge an individual blog by its category. In general there are categories of blogs that are less likely to be interested in this content than others. The foofy ones that talk about their kids, for example. My wife writes one of those, although it’s much better than the ones who feel the need to blog about going grocery shopping without making a point. I can guarantee that the only reason my wife would drop on a technology blog other than mine is if that blog dropped on her first. There’s just no interest there, but it does not mean that she doesn’t understand or care about technology.
Yes, there is a reason I stuck Entrecard at the top of the list. I was hoping to get my Entrecard visitors to glance a little longer before dropping their card and moving on to the next site. “Unique” is one of the best compliments I’ve received yet here. Thanks!
I know you’re not actually offending anyone but I found your wording to be very cute. I can understand you wanting to move up in ranks with respect to Google and Technorati so that puts the entire post into focus.
You are definitely right about those who “drop and run” and nothing can really be done about it. That is unless you want to call them out specifically (there’s a hint). I have come across a few blogs who express their concerns about dropping without commenting. I can’t say that I blame them for the way they feel because a lot of people are just out for the credits from dropping. I for one do take the time to read some of the things on blogs I’m visiting. If I find something interesting I will comment but most times I don’t and it’s only because I can’t find anything to contribute to the post. I prefer to visit and not comment than to visit and just leave a generic “hi” post that says nothing. Especially when I know that most sites I visit are looking for genuine comments.
Ah, unique is a good description. This is the second time I’ve seen a person come up with a different way to get Entrecard people to actually speak. So you’ve got this Entrecard person to step up to the “virtual mic” and I would say that is success.
ImitationAngels last blog post..Black Friday = Death Friday
Thought provoking post, not sure I’d want to have people leave me comments just to get a nickel.
I use Entrecard a lot and try to read a few posts and maybe find some cool new regular reads, lately I try to leave a meaningful comment if I like the site.
I do get quite a lot of traffic via Entrecard and Stumble Upon! Most probably dropping and running.
Miks last blog post..My blogging workspace – where the magic happens
@Mik
You would be surprised how many blogs do that. I’ve seen them as low as a penny and as high as 30 cents. A large number of comments gives the impression that people find your article interesting, worth reading, and worth commenting on. When I visit someone else’s site and there are a dozen comments on a post I am much more likely to click the “read more” button than if there are none.
I too try to read Entrecard sites that have updated their content since I last read them. I don’t consistently drop 300 because of that.
Speaking of stumbleupon I’m surprised that Google’s Adsense allows it since they don’t allow traffic exchange, and stumbleupon is in some ways worse than a traffic exchange.
Pretty good article. I’m just starting out a site, and started with entrecard. Not much going on yet, this info might come in handy. Thanks.
s0uThp4rks last blog post..Dual Monitor
I have only tried entrecard from this list and I agree with your assessment of it. I think it has definitely pushed up my Alexa, but has it got me readership? I dont know.
I like your discussion: Is it ethical. Yes it is ethical.
But is it meaningful to a blogger. Probably not because for a blogger it is about getting meaningful readership.
lvss last blog post..Technology: Problems and Prospects
@s0uthp4rk
Thanks for your comment and glad I could help! Hope Entrecard works out well for you.
@Ivs
Right, it is a tradeoff. You’ll get page hits and you’ll get readership, and they don’t equal eachother. The best kind of traffic is considered to be search engine traffic, yet how many times do you click through to a site from Google only to immediately click away when you realize that the site didn’t have exactly what you were looking for. Our only hope is to put our site in front of enough people that a small number of them will like what they see and return on their own. For other people it is more like the radio. I understand they play songs over and over on the radio because studies say that it takes a while for a tune to become catchy in people’s heads. So your site comes up day after day as someone is dropping on it, but eventually it becomes something the dropper is looking forward to as he/she gets to know you over time. In that sense, Entrecard is better than Google traffic for getting real and loyal readership.
I see you are using Adgitize, but you don’t mention it in this item – Also noticed your Adgitize ad for the first time today. good luck with it. I got paid last month. Only a tiny amount, but then wasn’t on for a whole month.
If your readers here decide to give it a try, note that is’s best if you post often. Your regular readers are more likely to stop if they see something new at the top, also click on other things on your page.
Jenny Fletchers last blog post..British Internet users face Chinese-style censorship
@Jenny Fletcher
Yes, I am new to Adgitize. I also have been shirking my regular posting duties. I should have some data on Adgitize and how much traffic it brings in soon.
PC I like this idea that repeated exposure leads to familiarity and then liking.
lvss last blog post..Using Machine Vision For Catching Terrorists
Interesting post and discussion with many different views being shared. I too am a member of Entrecard and recently Adgitize.
Your perception of new visitors needing some repeat exposure to sites before becoming loyal readers seems right on. That is my experience with Entracard for my droppers and myself. Though sometimes a site can grab you instantly.
Then comments started coming in for me and I also found myself motivated to comment on posts that I felt I could contribute to the discussion. For example, this is around my third time visiting your site. So familiarity may be the keyword here and that takes time. BTW I came via Adgitize.
Since joining Entrecard several months ago, I have had the privilege of meeting and interacting with other bloggers, many of whom I now consider friends.
Great post and discussion. It motivated me to comment
Have a great weekend!