how to spend a low budget on marketing

[tronicscribe]

My budget is $90 at the moment, and I would like to spend it in such a way that will get me the most traffic to my site. I guess my main goal is to increase my traffic right now, so I can in turn have a better monthly pageviews to show potential advertisers and hopefully be able to charge more for my ad space. my first thought was to set up google adwords, but then I thought I'd like to see if anyone here has a better idea.

so, how should I spend this money? and is this a wise investment? thanks!

[Toon]

You should take out your own ad space on sites that have alot of user that might benefit from your site, I mean advertising garden products on a shoe site is a waste but if you can try and get users that have something in common with your products then it should benefit you in the long term

[CVW]

I think you might be looking at this the wrong way round. If you want more pageviews to tempt advertisers onto your site, pushing low quality ( from the advertisers viewpoint) clicks to your site via Adwords or any other paid activity isn't going to help.

For a start, the market in advertising, PPC or ad impressions is mostly based around costs per click or cost per impression. The price you pay to get visitors is less than you will earn from advertisers - so the business model doesn't work. You will lose money. If you want to give a short term boost to your sites visibility, Adwords can work as long as you have a clear idea of what you want you visitors to do after they have arrived and nailed it ( subscribe, sign up, buy etc). And this needs a great site.

If you want more traffic for a site funded by selling advertising you need:

A search engine visible site. Free search traffic.
A reason for people to find you.
A reason for people to stay and return another day.

So, unless you already have a fantastically content filled site that is doing well in natural (ie, FREE) search - spend time and money on building a site worth visiting. The good traffic comes after that and the advertisers too.

Rob

PS Don't forget that direct advertisers are not as interested in no. of pagviews as they are who visits your site, where from and how likely they are to transact once they click on one of your ads.

[tronicscribe]

thanks for both of your inputs. well, I forgot to give a little background on my site that I'm trying to market. It is personally run, and recently launched. Portfolio’s Friend is pretty much like another one of those css gallery sites, where they just showcase other websites. however, I'm focusing on artist's portfolio websites, which I think gives it more of a niche.

anyway, because I only launched it a month ago, on may 20th, I'm still trying to get steady traffic. right now my pageviews are at around 1300, since it launched. I do not really have a goal though, unless you count getting people to subscribe to the feed. I mainly want people to visit and spend more time on the site. so far it goes 5 pages deep of portfolio archives, plus a blog.

I can't spend the money on building a better, more interactive website because I don't have the budget for that. however, I recently made a small bit of money on advertising, so that is why I have this $90 to spend at the moment. and I'd like to invest it in getting more people aware of the site, in hopes they will come back, because I don't really have any other goal right now. nothing to sign up for, or purchase (other than advertising.)

so, with all that in mind now, would it be most wise to spend the money on something like adwords, or buying ad space on a similar niche site that is more popular? or anything else? I agree it would be better to spend money on building an even better site, but I can't afford that right now. thanks again :)

[Toon]

make sure you manage the feed properly otherwise people won't return to the site. Do you know how many top sites I can read the full content through my RSS reader and don't even have to visit the site, most are CSS galleries. Their ads are never going to be clicked because I don't actually have to go to the site to view the content....



Example A, this is how I can view the main content you'd go there for, a preview of the site and a link to the site. I don't have to go to the site and wait for their logo, background, ads etc to load it simply delivers the main part to me faster.

People can laugh at these mistakes but out of 100 css gallery sites I've tested only 3 optimize their feed correctly and only 1 think about the title of the feed correctly, all make the same mistake and wonder why traffic and ad revenue is so low on them.

[tronicscribe]

hmm, I haven't thought of that. I'll look into optimizing for feed readers. so, is it possible to have the reader show your ads or entire page? this is a little discouraging. however, I tend to have a low number of subscribers, and a higher number of visits. this could be that my site is only a month old and people just haven't decided to subscribe yet. anyway, I'll look into that, and any more advice about how to optimize for such a thing would be great. thanks a lot.

[Toon]

If you use feedburner, (soon I think) you will be able to ad adsense to your feeds. But visits are much better than RSS readers

[webarchitect]

SEM and having reliable Authority link partners at this point can be a very big help.