Web advertising

[Glasgow_Retro]

I own a small retro clothing store in Glasgow and was recently turned onto a website GlasgowBigAd by a friend, a site aimed at Glasgow citizens and visitors alike, it offers very inexpensive advertising and promotional tools and i was wondering if any fellow small SMEs have had any success with such a site or if anyone had any advice on making the most of it.

P.S. I'm new to the site, so HIYA, maybe you caught my introduction.

[JustOneUK]

[£30 for 10x10 pixels] [PR3] [Alexa rank 1million+]
it looks like a waste of money to me.
just my 2c.

James.

[SirAlan]

Hi Glasgow_Retro,

My financial services firm began advertising with GlasgowBigAd a couple of months ago, to be honest it now seems a bit rash but we did't look into the marketing of the site itself but as it was only costing around 30p per day we just jumped right in.

In the two months since we have gained 8 new customers and have already covered the cost of the advert.

So, I guess if you have the money, go for it, the sites offering some good deals and is has retained a successful Glasgow Ad agency to handle their PR so their attraction can only improve.

[winningratings]

Being successful online is alot more difficult than most people think
Most websites make very few sales and judging by the number of "closed sites" i.e. deleted and pending domains, most people give up on their website venture pretty quickly - so it does need alot of persistence

What I would recommend is:

1) Do some good keyword and keyword phrase research - find out what people are typing in when they are searching, and then optimize different web pages for those different keyword phrases
2) Keep and maintain a blog - change the format so that every post is on a different page etc - post to it often and put a link to the blog and to the individual posts from your site. List the feed on MyYahoo and the various RSS/XML aggregation services
3) Start a mainling list on your site. Set up an autoresponder system and load it with plenty of messages. People can subscribe/unsubscribe at will. You could have 52 messages which are sent out every 7 days depending when the person signup. The purpose of the message is to give people a link to your site plus some basic info on a product with link etc
4) Find forums relevant to your products and post to them with your signature attached where possible
5) Use PPC on Google Adwords but DO NOT use broad match - find lots of keywords - I mean hundreds - which you can do an exact phrase match to. Keep all bids as low as possible, depending on the traffic/sales you generate

Hope that helps

[squalid]

i really dislike pixel ads sites. I know the question wasnt whether people liked them or not - but had to say it.

also, there is some discussion as to whether the search engines would view them as link farms of a sort.

[netdebut]

Squalid,

I agree, I very much dislike them as well. I find them a waste of "advertising theory." I mean, to be honest, pixel ads are really more appealing to the ADVERTISER than it is the visitor/customer!

Who in the right mind would come to a site to click on a bunch of icons to purchase something? Come on? Let's get real.

There were some college kids from... I can't remember the country, could have been Pakistan or something... they told me they were working on a project much like a pixel ad site except it would be a city and you could rent ad space on a building. So if you owned the home, you could rent it out to advertisers.

Yeah, it's appealing to advertisers because of the potential there... but once again, what person would come to such a place to click around and buy things from there?