The topic of how to market and reach a target audience (niche marketing) has come up a zillion times. While each marketer has his own method of what works and what doesn’t, I am going to share MY personal results as to what I have experienced in the now. There are many websites out there that focus on tactics that worked 3-8 years ago but due to heavy competition in the marketplace, the practices no longer get results or ROI. Let’s take a look at some advertising campaigns for marketing.
Pay Per Click: This type of marketing (also called PPC) has been around for over a decade. When Google first launched this it became an overnight success as marketing gurus looking to employ a cheap and easy advertising campaign dove right in. Back in the early 2000′s, there was no competition n any niche so people were literally setting up a pay per click campaign in “Dog Training” and getting hundreds if not thousands of clicks per day at .02 cents/click. As we all know, PPC is a bidding platform where the highest bidder gets the 1st position, etc. Well? once word got out of people advertising on Google and making a fortune, more and more jumped on the wagon and started doing the same thing. Fast forward to now 2012. The same .02 cent click is now $2.50 and competition is fierce! If you are a small business marketer with a small budget, are you going to compete with Amazon? Nope. Also, add into the mix…Google does not like affiliate marketing what so ever. If you fire up a campaign with an affiliate link or a website redirect from a top-level domain? They will ban you (known in the marketing world as the “Google Slap”) This is the situation with Bing and Yahoo too. This is where you get to buy views on tiktok as a small business in order to grow your presence online without any issue, that too in a short amount of time.
Banner Advertising: This type of marketing advertising campaign uses images to capture the prospect’s attention. The use of an image is placed on a website in various sizes and the banner image once clicked, will direct the prospect to your sales page/offer. Banner ads typically are PPC or CPM (cost per mile – typically 1000 impressions). Just like Google’s pay per click text ads, Banner ads worked awesome back in the mid 2000′s. Today? Not so much… People browsing the internet are so fed up with seeing banners everywhere that they have been brainwashed to ignore them. Sure, they probably see them but will they click? Probably not. I have tested banner ads through a website called BuySellAds. My results were less than stellar even on high traffic websites. If you want to try this form of advertising, shy away from small banner ads and irregular sizes such as 20×20, 125×125, 100×300, etc. The formats that get the most attention and click-through are 300×250, 250×250, 728×90 (only on a leader board position and above the fold), and 160×600. Even still, I used large formats targeting a niche site and got ho-hum results.
The above 3 banner ads that I did were in 3 different niches on 3 different websites. I made 3 total sales. 2 sales came from the leader board banner and 1 sale came from the 300×250 banner. At an average commission of $25, I took in $75 and spent $320 on advertising for a HUGE loss. Now, looking at the above impressions, you can reach the verdict that banner ads get completely ignored. As I said earlier, people see them and just avoid them.
Ugh, right? How many times do you log on to your home town newspaper online and get bombarded with pop up ads every time you click a link? Annoying, right? No one ever clicks on these as many are associated with viruses and spyware/malware. It’s a given and has been all over the news. Even legit companies like Netflix don’t get any click through on these…why do they keep doing it? HUGE advertising budget and brand awareness. You also have to realize that 92% of internet users have a pop-up blocker that bans the ad from even showing in the 1st place. Interstitial ads are the same concept but load in a different browser window behind the one you are loading/looking at. Typically, this form of sneaky advertising gets the same fate as the pop-up.
You can basically put all PPC and PPV (pay per view) whether it be on search engines or on Facebook and wrap them up and trash them. The cost per click is far too much for the average marketer. Many have lost their shirts within a week.
So what marketing advertising campaigns work in 2012 and 2013?
I won’t let the cat out of the bag just yet as version 2.0 is coming out on August 20th, 2012 (yes! 11 days). I have been using version 1 (the original) and have had the greatest success since Google Adwords PPC back in 2004. Many of my thousands of clicks have been less than .05 cents and the majority of them have been around .03 cents. It is also a system where once someone clicks on the ad, it will capture their email and of the 100% of clicks I get, close to 60% enter their email address in. This is HUGE! All of the campaigns I set up in version 1.0 got insane click-throughs and awesome sales conversions. on average, 1 out of 90 clicks netted a sale. And when you think that 90 clicks at .03/cents are only $2.70…Each sale was getting me a $24.75 commission. That is a $22.05 profit after the cost of clicks!!! On 1 of my campaigns, I was getting 600 clicks/day which was getting me 6 sales of $22.05 profit. O! and, don’t forget, I am collecting all the emails as well to build a huge list to market to in the future any time I want. So, even if they don’t buy and I don’t get the commission the first time around, perhaps I will 5 days down the line.
