The time has come for some advertising.  While sales have been steady, I want them to explode.

I was completely disillusioned when I went into Google Adwords.  With various four or five letter search word combinations, I was thinking I could reach people for about 5 cents per click.  Bzzzt.  Wrong answer.  For my niche, even with 5 words, I’m looking at $4 per click.

Yikes!

When I completely changed my word combination, I managed to get to 50 cents per click.  But my search results are limited to a few hundred per month.

My initial budget for advertising was set at $100 per month.  So the choice was simple: continue with Adwords or find another way.  I elected to find another way.

What I decided to do was put myself into my prospective client.  If they go to Google and type in a phrase, what are they looking for?  For me, I’m not looking for a sales pitch.  Information is my goal.  So while the entire page may be peppered with ads, if I just want to learn then I click on a website.  Then what happens to the Google adwords?  Nine times out of ten, they disappear.

So what’s left?  The website.  Then it occurred to me that advertising on websites might be the better use of my money.  Text link or banner ad: doesn’t matter.  With thousands of people visiting a site each month, my site will be splashed in front of them.

One sight in my top search results gets 16,000 unique visitors per day with advertising between $65 and $100 per month depending on banner size and location.  With a click-thru rate of 0.5%, this means 80 visitors per day.  Over a month, my site could possibly receive 2,400 unique visitors or a click-through cost of 4 cents per person.  Where I originally wanted to be.

If I could have a skyscraper ad versus a banner ad, my click-thru rate would be doubled to 1%.  But so far the sites I’ve been negotiating with are banner ads only.

So I’ll have to pull out the oldest marketing trick in the book to get people to click.  Using a powerful marketing word that everyone knows:

FREE