What would you do?

[RussellC]

If you had $100.00 a month to spend on web marketing and search engine promotion, what would you do?

I have already paid for INK Inclusion and thats about it. No Yahoo! submission, no Overture, no AdWords. The site has been getting hits off of Google, and other free listings alone since it started in January. Any suggestions on what I should start paying for?

Thanks for the help,
Russell

[agerhart]

$100 a month is pretty low.

You won't be able to cover the expenses for Yahoo!. I doubt that you will have enough to cover an Overture campaign, unless you do some serious keyword refining.

Are you looking to spend on pay-for-spidering, directory submission like Business.com, or a listing like Yahoo! Sponsored sites?

[RussellC]

I know 100 per month is pretty low, that was just a guesstimate. I will probably sumit to yahoo anyways. How much do you think I need for a good overture campaign, it seems like it gets really good results if you are in the top 3.

[Mike_Mackin]

RussellC :)

April Fools is over!

You will need at least $100 per hour. ;)

[RussellC]

Whoops...i meant 100 dollars per week.. sorry

[agerhart]

The reason it gets good results being in the top 3 is the listing will appear on Yahoo!, AltaVista, MSN, AOL, etc.

The money spent on an Overture campaign depends on the keywords being targeted. We have seen people go through alot of money within days. One client that is running an Overture campaign burns through $20,000 a month.

[rcjordan]

I'd go to the top SEs, search for independent niche sites and contact them about advertising. If you find one or two, open a frank discussion with them about their traffic. I'd try to work a flat-rate deal for boxed text ads. You'd be surprised what $50/mo can buy if you go direct.

<added>
You've changed the spec, but I'd still look at this route -find the right one(s) and you may give up bidding.

[JamesR]

Definitely go PPC if you get your numbers down and are making $ on every click

[NFFC]

>what would you do?

If it's the site in your profile I would lock the marketing director in a room for a few hours and introduce her to the realities of the world wide web. You need as a bare minimum $100,000 budget, not all at once though, feed in $10,000 and assess the ROI. imho

[beasscr]

Russell, first you might want to check your site in Netscape. It doesn't show very well!

[RussellC]

beasscr, already working on that. It's a .css issue with NS 4.7.

Thanks though,
Russell

[EliteWeb]

Id advertise on other web pages that follow the topics of your site. Your webpage has a lot of relavency for quite a few topics. If you work it out right you can get direct links rather than just a link in their ad system which goes through one of their CGI scripts. Hhell you got a link on my site now :)

[Brad]

>search for independent niche sites and contact them about advertising.

This is spot on. There are some very good deals to be had here and the traffic is pre-qualified. Many of these independent niche sites have not been "found" by the Big Boys so they have excess capacity and too few advertisers.

It sure does not hurt to investigate.