Ecommerce Advertising Ideas.

[inyopools]

I own a company that sells home and garden products through a website. I wanted to find out from others on what types of successes and failures they have had in regards to advertising there ecommerece websites. I am looking for ideas outside of the normal advertising avenues such as Google Adwords, Overture and SEO We have had some good success using shopping.com and also starting up an ebay store. We are looking at ways to increase our exposure on the web.

I would also be interested in what type of success companies have had in offline advertising, such as doing a catalog. We have looked at possibly doing a catalog but the pricing is so expensive. It seems like the advertising dollars that we would spend towards a catalog could be put to better use through web advertising. The catalog route was going to be aproximately $20,000 for 3 mailings of 10,000 to exsisting customers. Any experiences or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Morgenhund]

We considered starting off-line ad-campaigns more than once, but every time even a short analisys have shown how prohibitive their prices are.

Another difficulty is in analysis of ROI. The ad-sellers always tell you something like "your 3-lines text AD will be shown in"... say 200,000 copies of our yellow-pages-like-catalogue... So what? What if my investment returns exactly zero sales?

I'm not going to invest a fortune into a dummy AD-campaign, where results are unpredictsble and mostly unmeasurable.

At the moment we're trying essential e-business workarounds, like newsletters, own affiliate campaings, link exchange etc, and still looking for the cheapest and measurable off-line methods.

A possible solution might to buy ads together with an another business -- I saw recently a billboard featuring a dating web-site (happy couple in front of Senseo cafee-automat). Probably it is a good mean to reduce risk.