Posted on Friday 2nd of February 2007 at 13:52 in Make Money Online

Advertising your website - Conclusion

Welcome to the final article in my series on advertising your website, in this series we've investigated:

Part One: Social Bookmarking
Part Two: StumbleUpon Advertising
Part Three: Buying Traffic
Part Four: Text-Link-Ads
Part Five: Sharing Traffic

This conclusion is to summarise the findings on what is the most productive way to advertise your website out of the methods tested.

What makes a good method
The best method offers the most visitors per dollar, weighted against the chance of the user hanging around / contributing anything.

The best

I've been a big supporter of the social bookmarking method outlined in the first article because you get a massive traffic boost which is a nice motivation to keep writing, your ads often get some extra clicks, it's good for your PageRank because people will link to you and it's free. It's a hard beast to tame but the right article could mean you've got an instant couple of hundred people on your RSS feed waiting to see what you do next. A good follow up article and you could have converted an extra 50 people to be regular readers - an excellent ROI (return over investment) as far as I'm concerned.

The main problem is obviously getting the material on there in the first place and find the right level of positive support early on. It's not uncommon for fantastic submissions to fall on their arse - social bookmarking doesn't follow the "great content gets recognition" law of blogging. If you want to increase your site's visibility, then this is your hold grail.

The worst

I couldn't possibly classify Text-Link-Ads as being the worst because there are specific things you can do to ensure you get a very positive experience - I did however highlight the importance of choosing the right site and doing your research. The worst would have to be the buying of traffic.

The reason buying traffic is the worst is because there's too much material on the internet suggesting that these services are fraudulent. Either way, you're paying for untargeted traffic and that's never good - even if they were real visitors.

The ambiguous

Traffic sharing is an interesting concept which could prove remarkably effective when utilised correctly. A small community of like minded webmasters actively contributing/participating on each others' sites would be a good thing. Visiting a site for the minimum amount of time in order to get tokens so that people will do the same to your site is about as worthwhile a use of your time as trying to overclock your kettle. I estimated 66 minutes of browsing for 100 visitors, which is really not worth it.

What can we take from this

That StumbleUpon is an interesting advertising medium that delivers exactly what it promises but seldom converts, social bookmarking can deliver massive wins if used correctly, that traffic sharing and buying traffic are as useless as one another and that Text-Link-Ads requires thought and research to be used effectively.

What else could I have looked at?
I'd love to have experimented with Google Adwords but that requires a couple of things I don't have - money and a product/service to market. It would be an exciting venture though, maybe I'll start planning a second experiment if this one has proven popular.

I'd love to investigate and quantify the benefits of link exchanges and other link building methods but I feel that would be difficult to manage.

I'd also really like to measure press releases as a method of advertising your site - it's looking increasingly likely that I'll start work on a second set of ways to advertise your site.

Conclusion
There's obviously no clear winner, social bookmarking can deliver the most for free but is notoriously hard to manipulate and is temperamental at best. StumbleUpon is a consistent performer, delivering visitors at $0.05 each targeted towards a specific topic - which is nice but you're unlikely to get any back links or regular readers out of it. The main conclusion is to avoid traffic share schemes and buying traffic outright because you're wasting your money.

Can you prove me wrong?
If you've had a really positive experience with either traffic sharing or buying traffic please let me know because there's clearly not enough positive feedback for these services online.

I hope you've enjoyed this series of articles and like I mentioned above, if there's enough interest I'll write a second set using different methods

Leave comments against this article expressing whether another series would be useful and what you'd like to see investigated.

The Series of Articles
See below the published articles on the topic:
Introduction
Part One: Social Bookmarking
Part Two: StumbleUpon Advertising
Part Three: Buying Traffic
Part Four: Text-Link-Ads
Part Five: Sharing Traffic
Conclusion

 

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