Pay-Per-Performance Advertising
Advertising can be a hit or miss proposition.
You advertise your product and hope that someone
notices, likes it and buys. That is fine if you
have a lot of money to spend experimenting with
different methods and catch phrases, but for most
of us this is just not a luxury that we can
afford.
What do you do? Free Advertising? You try traffic exchanges, but people generally go there to get traffic for their own websites. Paid Advertising? You try pay-per-click, but that can be cost ineffective because just because someone
clicks doesn’t mean someone buys. You could try
newspaper advertising, but then again, you’ve already
paid and are not guaranteed results.
What a lot of savvy businesses have done is advertise
via online coupon. This is an enticement for people
to visit. If they visit once they could become repeat
visitors and that is the Holy Grail for any business.
The beauty is that you only have to pay if the coupon
is honored. You don’t have the expense of generating
the coupon, distributing the coupon and finally the
cost off the top of redeeming the coupon. You would,
however, have to advertise the coupon…arghhh! You
are right back in the same boat right…wrong. You
can have millions of websites advertising your coupon
in minutes. Sounds too good to be true right? What’s
the catch. The “catch” is that you must pay a portion
of the coupon savings to the person who brought you
the customer. But is that really a catch or just a
justifiable cost of advertising this way? Think about
it this way. If pay-per-click advertising worked this
way, you’d only have to pay Google if they actually
made a SALE for you, not a CLICK. Does it make more
since to spend .30 per click or .50 per sale? That is
the advantage of advertising using online coupons.
You ONLY pay if they deliver. You can have thousands
or even millions of people advertising your offer
around the world in minutes.
Who offers this kind of service? There are local
companies that will allow you to do this. One
that comes to mind is Salt Lake City Sites (SLSITES.COM)
or Richmond.com (in Richmond, VA). However, I’ve only run
across one that will allow you to advertise worldwide and
that is 4NiceOffers.com. You sign up as a merchant, create
your coupon online, decide how much you want to offer the
people who will be promoting your offer (yes…you decide
this amount) and they begin advertising for you immediately.
You could conceivably have millions of websites all over
the world advertising your deal in less than a day. And
you only pay if the coupons are redeemed. The only advice
I’d give you is to jump on 4NiceOffers…offer…immdiately.
They are relatively small right now and have plenty of room
for merchants, but that will change as more people become
aware of them.
This type of advertising makes sense. You waste money on
advertising that is at best hit-or-miss if you pay up-front
with no guarantees of success. Advertising using online
coupons saves you money and guarantees success (you only
pay if they are successful).
Yolanda McDonald is Business Systems Analyst in Baltimore, MD. She has 15 years of experience in programming, design and analysis on several platforms including Midrange, Client/Server and the Internet. You can find more of her do-it-yourself web design, programming and tips articles at http://www.ymcdonald.com, the site that caters to the poor sucker who got conned into building a friends, a churches or a small-small businesses website.