I have around £500 to spend promoting a general shopping site. Whats the best way to do this? PPC, Altavista, Inktomi, Looksmart, Yahoo, Email Lists, or several smaller PPC sites ie splut?? I dont want any off your secrets just a little point in the right direction.
Overture first, Google adwords select second. Overture gives by far and away (in my experience at least) the best results out of all the PPC engines with Google coming in second.
Experiment first though. Deposit say £50 in an Overture account and £50 in Google Adwords Select. Then monitor the traffic for a few days and see what works for you. Try different keywords too.
Don't bother with eSpotting, mailing lists, Looksmart or Splut.
It may be worth considering the £150 Yahoo! listing fee though (or however much it is these days) although I've heard mixed reports about it's success.
It's also worth partimng with the £20 or so for Inktomi, although I doubt you will get huge traffic from this. But best cover it.
It's not that I don't rate eSpotting, it's just that I think the other 2 are better. And if you're only on a £500 budget you don't want to spread yourself too thin.
Personally I would say Adwords, Adwords and Adwords. I have yet to be able to generate significant traffic from Overture at a cost that leaves me with a profit. Words that cost $0.05 on Google can cost many times that amount on Overture, and the worst mistake I have made is to generate traffic at all costs - result is no money and an overall loss. Adwords is just so easy and instant to 'tweak' rather than waiting days for the others. I have got wary this week of increasing my Adwords bids to get a top 3 position and be syndicated on AOL - my initial impression is that the extra hits don't generate as much converting traffic. I find Mirago and Espotting both can be useful and use Overture but without much success so far.
I'd recommend you do one thing first, get a list of the better pay per click search engines. Next, either do a keyword suggestion search with their tool to find out how many times your keywords were looked up in the past.
Or if not, contact a sales person from the list of better PPC se's and have them email you the history reports.
You may also want to find a specialty PPC search engine that focuses on shopping. That way you get buyers who are already looking to purchase. This may be an option for you. But at the same time, get that sites stats from a sales person before you advertise.
For a list of the better search engines get a copy of a directory with all this information and account start up costs from www.payperclickprices.com
Its the only site that gives you this kind of information and it will save you hours and hours of time looking it up individually. Its brand new information on the internet.
May be old hat to some and i know this link has been posted before but it has beeen great for me and i would reccomend it to anyone just getting into keywords.....
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