Where to advertise my website?

[gamesmaster]

Hi guys

Newbie here :)

I have a website and wondering where is the most effective place to advertise? I used to spend £50 a day on google adwords which only brought in 1 sale a day.

Any help would be great!

[eventdomain]

Well, what sort of Games site are we talking about, Video Games? See you've chosen to enter a pretty saturated market, so for this to work it really needs to specialise.

You'd also need substantial industry knowledge - it would be handy!

[gamesmaster]

By the way, are you allowed to sell on the forums?

[gamesmaster]

Well, what sort of Games site are we talking about, Video Games? See you've chosen to enter a pretty saturated market, so for this to work it really needs to specialise.

You'd also need substantial industry knowledge - it would be handy!

I am based in both the retail and wholesale sector of buisness. My website is for retail customers and i sell electronics,phones,video games.

[eventdomain]

By the way, are you allowed to sell on the forums?

If the forum allows it, then Yes. Personally, it's not a great way to do sales , it also makes you look like a webmaster and you don't want that stigma, trust me on that...... Businesses and buyers want to do business with large companies, not the 'bedroom squad'.

[wood1e2]

Spending money with Google may get you the ranking for a short of long period of time, depending on budget. But if the website is not up to much then people will just click away.

I suspect yours is a highly competitive niche, and if you website is no match against the big hitters, then you will struggle with a small budget.

You might want to look at onsite SEO and offsite, and imrpove your organic rankings. Obviously after looking at why people may have arrived at your site then not bought anything.

Therefore spending your money improving your website, and internet presence would be the best way forward.

If it is non of the above it may that you were choosing the wrong keywords for you website/niche. You may have not stood a chance from the begining.

A short anwer to your question would be internet then Ebay, CAr boots, flyers, local papers!!??!

[eventdomain]

I am based in both the retail and wholesale sector of buisness. My website is for retail customers and i sell electronics,phones,video games.

Ah okay, so it's not just video games, hmmm, see I have a heavy background in Retail and also in selling video games, but your problem is everyone else is doing the retail Games thing too. Also you can't specialise in video games as the niche is about as small as it gets, it cannot be fragmented eg: a game is a game..

Best bet for the Video games is Ebay, simple set up, fast to get going, lots of eager buyers etc etc.

[eventdomain]

CAr boots, flyers, local papers!!??!

Yup, see what he's suggesting but not great ideas and here's why:

Flyers get treated like spam and binned.
Local papers you're looking at £160 a pop to advertise

Car boot, hmm I tried it a few years back, lot's of standing about and few sales. You will be competing with right Pro's!!!!!! these guys are damn hot experts in selling at Car boot events, and some make their living doing it. But those have done it for years and know the game inside out.

[wood1e2]

We don't know that this guy is not a pro...so they are good suggestions, some if not all have draw backs. :)

And if Flyers were not effective why do we get so many and why do printers/finishers spend their time printing and finshing them?

It is a bit like cold calling, people who do are the son of the devil, but they wouldn't do it if it didn't get a positive response.

[eventdomain]

We don't know that this guy is not a pro...so they are good suggestions, some if not all have draw backs. :)

If he was, then I doubt he'd be on a forum asking for promotion advice :rolleyes:

And if Flyers were not effective why do we get so many and why do printers/finishers spend their time printing and finshing them?

Bcos they make a shed load of cash doing it. Doesn't mean it works for every business out there.

Also only certain types of business can 'get away' with using them. You know what I do when I see a flyer? I bin it without even reading it. Flyers are cheap, and it's not the best form of flattery to recieve one - do these companiess want my money? -- well then do a proper selling job on me then, but don't annoy me with cheap flyers.

Takeaways get away with it - the local Insurance Co, won't!

[JElder]

Flyers can work - but it depends on the market - I work for a telemarketing company (http://www.synergyconnections.co.uk) and sometimes we turn away jobs as we cannot see how they would work from a cost point of view - if the profit on each sale is £20, you have to be making more than one sale per hour to break even. Most of our projects are B2B as consumers just don't spend enough to make all the effort of calling them!

Google ads is a good one as well - if you advertise for specialist items, then there are limited options for the buyer, and few sites to click on. For something very generic like games, they have a lot of online retailers, online FAQs, reviews, etc, all competing for clicks, and there are so many it is easy to jump from one to the other.

For retail games, you need to have something different. Consider something like 'no shipping charges' and make the most of it - on adverts, on the front page of the site, etc. SEO is going to be hard in this market, but you could consider banner ads in some related sites, such as a smaller games review site (bigger ones are likely to be too expensive) or in related sites that tend to target the same audience, such as car modification site (males 18-25 being the main target for the Xbox and PlayStation crowd).

Magazine advertising is getting cheaper, but is likely to be totally out of your budget for a decent ad, and there are no guarantees of even a single enquiry.

[eventdomain]

Yep -adding to the above, suggest getting a Recommend Us tool, and when using banners, try a banner exchange service, as it's doubtful websites will place your banner for free.

Get the following for your website:

Add to favourites link
On-site Blog for your News, happenings, offers etc (Not for others to post!).

Links page for link swaps
Display your offers on the homepage
Get testimonials/put on homepage
Use Youtube for marketing videos
Use community interaction eg: Comments board (limit the words)


Pay attention to how the site looks - its design. Make it attractive, nice colours, not too copycat, but above all be different in a major way.

[sirall]

Hello there,

If you want to advertise your website you can do it at targro.com for free. You can add your website to the particular category of your choice. And all this can be done for free in very few easy steps.

So try out targro.com

[Urbanite]

As a small business owner I struggled to go against bigger companies on google etc and found that there are a few free business listing directories that pushes a lot of customers my way for free - just register your business at Qype.co.uk

You can pay for a listing too but the free bit lets you put up photos and have live feedback with your customers. :)

[Drachsi]

Creditability is very important. Do every one of your emails have a signature, are you posting posting in Forums, joining Newsgroups, using Social Networking, Blogging, writing articles and demonstrating examples on YouTube?

This is the way you build up creditablity.

Drachsi

[neil358]

Hi,

in the past i have used a few free sites -

google (business solutions link)
gumtree
uksmallbusinessdirectory (member on here) (UKSBD)
zygela (member on here) (JOZO)
freeindex
bttradespace
streetslocal (member on here) (streetslocal)

I am not a big company neither but if you search for directories, it may be long winded but a lot of them are free and alot are paid, it just takes time and a fair bit of hard work, but it pays off!

Check out my site, blindology (cant add weblinks yet!)

I have not paid for any advertising.

If you search for blinds Plymouth you may see>?

Hope this helps.

[Money Saving Auctions]

its all about getting traffic to your site that is relevant to your business....

[Drachsi]

its all about getting traffic to your site that is relevant to your business....

This is the big time user. If you spend too much time promoting yourself, not a lot left for customer work, too much customer work, no promotion.

Drachsi

[Drachsi]

You need to have online flyers out there which are always feeding back leads. One I created and works well is at http://www.squidoo.com/creating-lenses (http://www.squidoo.com/creating-lenses) This lets you use any hobby, interest or business related information to create a stand alone webpage which is index by Google very often.

The other is using your blog, this can be very effective.

Drachsi