The Results of Your Advertising Are The Results of Your Efforts

How do you pick where to advertise? Is it based on cost? Targeted market? Ability to offer an engaging technology? Most likely all of the above. What most people don’t consider is that the quality of your ad is just as important as where and when you place it. I am constantly amazed how many people make an ad put it up and then bitch about how it doesn’t perform, blaming it on the form of media it was place on.

Successful advertising is both art and skill.  Oversimplifying it,  there are two forms I use every day to market my businesses.  One, is the reminder ad.  It’s an ad in a market that I’ve covered pretty well and I just want to remind people that I’m still there.  It’s not a hard sell just an ad that hopefully grabs their attention and makes them think about me.  Hopefully the next time they are about to buy a product in my category they will think of that ad and come out.  Awareness.  To me the most important part of these ads is making sure I’m reminding them of our business and to consider us when purchasing our type of products or services.  Because all ad prices are based on number of viewers,  obviously I want to try and target the audience to get the most bang for my dollar.  Running ads on a college radio station is not going to do me much good except to sell them hydroponic equipment or houseplants.  My target audience is talk radio, easy listening, even country.   On Tv it’s news.  Working people about to go out to their jobs. They are generally the ones that have homes.

For my online businesses I run my awareness ads on blogs and forum sites that talk about plants.  They are very targeted, already buyers of plants and accessories and I just remind them to visit my sites if they want more information.  I don’t have a lot of sites set up to sell yet but I am making more money on the Google clicks than the cost of the ads because of they are very targeted users.  Eventually I am moving over to the hard sell ad.

The call to action or selling ads are like the ones you see on Facebook.  Are you Fat? Credit problem?  You like music?  Ads that entice you through appealing subject matter. Once they get you to their site they hope to sell you off to someone else or sell you a product.  Of course I want to add 3 inches what do I need to buy?  These ads are tough to get right, especially online.  I experimented early with conversion on Facebook. You can make a lot or lose even more, depending on your ad and your landing page.  If advertising on Google is 30 mph, then Facebook is 200 mph on crack.  You find out quickly how good your ads are.  You pay per impression and if nobody clicks you get killed.   I lost a thousand bucks in a few hours a couple years ago and then made it back in a few hours, only to lose twice as much the next day with the same ad.  And I heard it’s gotten even harder to make money on Facebook ads.  But what it proves is that it all comes down to your ad.

I get people that want to advertise on my site all the time ( AD…. I have a 250X 250 and a 125 left) and most people ask how many uniques a day.  I have no problem telling people I average 650-700 a day because those users are domain investors and I feel that’s a pretty good number of people for our industry.  As targeted as you can get if that’s who you are trying to reach.  Here’s the catch.  Nobody is going to click on those ads to the right unless you give them a reason.  You have to be more creative if you want clicks.  If you just want to create awareness then it works great.  They will see it every time they come here and be reminded.  That alone has value and purpose.  But if you want clicks, don’t blame me.  Make a better ad.  That’s a different kind of ad.  You have to give them a reason to stop what they are doing and click.  You sell domains, put your best one on the ad and entice them.  Work with me on an article, a promotion.  Use product placement in a story.  There are a million ways to get people to come to your site but most advertisers hand over a 125 by 125 graphic and that’s it.  Theo gets it.  He does a lot of the fantastic work you see for some other domain sites and bloggers.  He knows how to make ads that stand out. Most don’t.

If you’re going to advertise then do it right.  It doesn’t matter how much you spend if you put up an ad that is not appealing.  Spend the money on better logos, better ads.  Then and only then can you truly judge the effectiveness of your different campaigns.