As I started advertising using various methods, I noticed my
capital dropping like a rock. Then I began to think...I wish I
had more capital to keep on advertising. I wanted to advertise
big; give my site a huge exposure so I can reach out to tens of
thousands of merchants at a time. Advertising was easy, but
getting the results I wanted wasn't. If I had enough capital
like other comparison shopping websites, I was sure my site
could be successful. However, with the capital that I had
leftover, there was no way I could stay up on search engines for
long. I was basically competing with large companies so small
and medium size merchants don't have to. And that could've been
easier if I had merchants to start off with, and adding funds to
their account, but I started out with zero. This was a major
setback.
The letters that I personally typed up and mailed out showed a
close to 1/100 conversion rate. The companies emailed me with
interested, and with questions. Most of their questions were:
"What type of marketing are you doing to get new buyers?" and
"Are you able to accept FTP uploads of listings and daily
updates to reflect prices and in-stock changes?" That second
question got me all confused. I didn't know they meant by FTP
uploads of listings. Then I contacted Relmax.com - Lesson V.
Email marketing by RelationServe showed no results whatsoever. I
don't even know if they sent out the promised emails to 10,000
online merchants--a test package they offered. I wasn't able to
track back the visitors that their emails brought me, and out of
those 10,000 opt-in online merchants, ZERO merchants signed up
for FREE.
Yahoo! Search Marketing, although quite costly, got me merchants
to sign-up and submit products to my site's directory. Their
Fast Track program provided me with effective keywords and
descriptions that got me good search page positioning at
affordable cost-per-click fee. Their service was quite effective
with my affiliated website, and it didn't disappoint me this
time either.
Google Adwords, on the other hand, was a repeat disappointment.
It was too expensive, and their Jumpstart program came up with
very broad, general keywords for my purpose, which gave me high
cost-per-click rates. The more general keywords are, the more
advertisers use them to gain exposure, the more competitive it
is to get higher positioning. Thanks to their general keywords,
I was paying over $2.00 per click to be on the first page of
search results. Why compete for the first page? Because majority
of search engine users stop looking after the first page. I
personally use Google a lot for personal use to do research, but
Google Adwords really disappoint me.
After advertising in many different categories, I felt like I
was cheated out of money in most of them. The only service that
didn't put me down was Yahoo! Search Marketing, and their Fast
Track program. After learning these expensive lessons, I wish I
had invested all my capital into Yahoo!
If you would like to share any of your advertising experiences,
please feel free to email me at writings@imbae.net
About the author:
ImBae.net - Entrepreneurial Life Stories & Lessons
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