WAHM Business - making the most of your advertising money
WAHM Business - Your Advertising Money
Be a wise investor in your business! You have found a website online that offers advertising. Its $5 a week to put your button or text ad on their front page sounds low enough, well, actually that $20 a month. This is the point where you stop. Take a breath. Plan your next step. Before you go any further in entertaining thoughts on advertising on that website, you have some homework to do! Website Traffic Alexa uses "hits" identified through traffic monitors, its toolbar on other people's sites and Google information to give a rating. Key in the site you want to know more about then click on "site info" and you will know whether it's a website with solid traffic or not. Take the rating with a grain of salt. The quality of hits is more important than the number but there are website's that offer to place your button or advertisement for a fee that are not generating traffic and have a low Google page rank. Search Engine Traffic Go to Google.com then Yahoo.com, MSN.com to do some keyword searches associated with the website you are considering. Do several searches with your key words for your products, services, different aspects of your WAHM business then add parts of the website under consideration to see if search engines will direct any traffic to that site and eventually your ad. Your niche market Know what types of people you want to respond to your ad or click on your button. Do you want buyers, one time buyers or develop a customer base. Look again at the site to see who you believe the visitors are and what they will be looking for online. Do you offer what they are looking for? WAHM Sites versus specific niche markets WAHM Sites are a great place to market if you provide services work at home moms need to build their business. If you offer a work at home opportunity, then WAHM sites are a good place to start once you've determined that there is adequate traffic. BUT and this is a big BUT! If you want to make sales for products that are NOT specific to work at home moms. You need to turn your focus on sites that have women looking for your product. To sell children's books...look for family and parenting sites instead of a work at home site. Why? To generate traffic to your site for future sales and build a customer base you need to focus beyond work at home sites to sell your products...go where your market is! Your advertising dollars are better spent reaching a broader audience whether its gift shops, parenting and women's sites or even newsletters. Do the math. Before you pay for advertising whether it's on a website or ezine. Know the website traffic or e-zone circulation, both the "who" of visitors and the "how many." Return on investment (ROI) is a gamble with advertising. Go to any website then visualize your own site. Look at the buttons, text ads, articles, the entire front page. Do you click on everything you see? No, you have your own agenda when you visit a website. You venture into a site using your own sense of direction based on what you are looking to find. The same holds true for every visitor. If your ad is one of 5 you have a better chance of a click than if your ad is one of 15. Then again, if your button is on a site where few of the visitors are looking for what you offer then your chances for success are out of reach. If your button ad rotates through many different pages on different days, your ad is seen only by the people that click onto that specific page. Paying for advertising is a matter of numbers and improving your odds of getting your WAHM business name out there on the internet where you want it. Finally, make sure you take advantage of free ads in newsletters and ezines. I offer them and other ezine subscribers do too. I send in my ad just like everyone else because as a target, ezines can offer such a broad audience. Many newsletter publishers belong to co-ops which mean you can "potentially" reach over a million readers. Again, basic math tells me that if my text ad goes out to 1 million readers and only 5-10 % respond to my ad that's still a solid return on my investment. Never forget your WAHM business goals and your market! If you invest poorly, take it as a learning experience and move onward, upward. This is your WAHM business! You own it and you build it. Persistence and being open to learning both the good and the bad about online business are the keys to your success! Learn more about operating and marketing a successful WAHM Business Tammy Ames is the owner of Make Money - Not Mistakes aka WAHM Connections - a home business blog developed to help other online business owners find their fit in the internet marketing world. Return to... WAHM Forum
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