This is shed site related, so if you are not interested in sheds stuff then look way now! but it does cover SEO & online advertising..a bit.
The other week I set up a test advert for www.readersheds.co.uk on the Guardian’s Local Cardiff website, using the addiply “platform”.
It’s the first time in the history of readersheds (9 years) that I have ever bought any online advertising, traffic to the sites has always been about Word of Shed and you great sheddies, then SEO, and side things like shedblog & flickr and now twitter (which brings some great traffic to both sites)
I have been lucky to have got some great press over the past few years running the Shed of the year competition which has help my search engine ranking with links from all sorts of high ranking sites such as boingboing and makezine and many newspaper sites (who don’t share the linklove), and of course this year having a large cash prize tends to get people interested :), thanks to Cuprinol Sprayable 😉
According to the stats I had a
I had a lot of views of my advert (according to addiply) but of course there is no way of knowing if anyone actually bothered to read it, maybe using some sort of heatmap stats may be a future feature but considering my budget not that many clicks.
I dont think it was a total waste of time/money as its was very easy to set up and was just a trial, but as my yearly marketing budget is now spent, may try something else next year.
what are your views on small time advertising on facebook/google adsense, or is word of mouth and SEO the best way to go?
of course if you are a local shed company that wishes to give this a way of targetting local ads to poeple actually intrested in the subject matter try why not use the addiply.com boxes on the righthand side of the shedblog.co.uk .. from only £5 a week, cheap I would say.. 😉