Advertising

FashionFront · #1 28-03-2010, 11:28 AM

Good Afternoon all,

Having recently set up an online business i was keen to ask what people thought about advertising.

What free advertising and paid advertising should i look at and perhaps steer away from? Any good sites you can recommend?

Also i was interested if anyone has tried advertising with a youtube video?

Regards

#2 28-03-2010, 11:39 AM

The generalised answer imho is that different advertising media works for different businesses so there is no hard and fast rule.

If advertising is free, you need to ask yourself why? The best free advertising you can get online is good seo to get a good serp of your site with a good call to action meta description.

Or offline a press article or product review by a national paper / magazine.

Paid for advertising (online), Google Adwords is hard to beat.

Offline, imo Yellow Pages is only good if you are aiming for an elderly customer base, newspapers are really only any good for brand building, local papers need to be on front page or be a builder. Leaflets very hit and miss. Ads in newsagents windows can be surprisingly affective, but is time consuming and area restrictive.

And if you sell b2b then of course there is always FBF to consider

#3 28-03-2010, 11:45 AM

Whoops....almost forgot social media, Twitter, Facebook, blogging are all great free methods of advertising if done right.

Maslins · #4 28-03-2010, 12:03 PM

As suggested above, it depends upon what you're selling.

For me, networking (both social and...real) are the main winners of new clients. Most people know what accountants do, so typically I win clients by simply being the accountant that business owners know the best/like the most.

If on the other hand you've got something a bit more unique, then more traditional advertising is perhaps a more viable option.

Kip FX Design · #5 28-03-2010, 12:20 PM

The UK Business Directory, free advertising and business listings are offering lifetime listings for ?25 at the minute, don't think just go, I took the whole country lol! Search any town for graphic design or web design and I am there front and centre! And at that price it is invaluable.

If you just want to create a link, you can hammer all the free ones (which i would do anyway) but do a couple a week, do not saturate it all in one go, and like IP says, they are free for a reason, but still worth going for!

FashionFront · #6 28-03-2010, 04:55 PM

thanks for your thoughts!

what do you think about youtube videos for advertising?

Maslins · #7 28-03-2010, 08:32 PM

Dunno, I made a feeble attempt at one several months ago. Tweeted it and got a couple of retweets. Didn't quite go viral like I'd hoped though!

Why will people want to watch it?

#8 28-03-2010, 08:45 PM

I don't know how many YouTube videos are out there, but I suspect more by keyword search than you have direct competitors. So with You Tube you are not just competing against your industry rivals, you are competing against everyone who makes a video.

In any industry I have been involved in I tend to find up to 10 serious competitors in any given market. In YouTube I find thousands of individuals competing against me...not for sales...but to get seen, I therefore dismiss YouTube as a serious business application.

Great to link to if you upload a video to promote your business from other media, hopeless as a standalone advertising tool.

Kip FX Design · #9 29-03-2010, 12:30 AM

I agree with IP, my vids go onto youtube through my vid program (free hosting, be daft not to) but they are made for the site and the traffic, not made for Youtube itself.

You just have to stick at it and title them correctly.

Maslins · #10 29-03-2010, 07:20 AM

One other thing I noticed when looking at my video's "competition" was that they obviously had a load of people they could rely upon to leave 5 star ratings for it. Most had almost as many 5 star ratings as they had views...and they certainly weren't that good!

Bit like one of those battle of the band nights where the band who brings the most mates wins and talent is irrelevant (cos of course my vid was the best!)

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