Advertising
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on December 10, 2009
Recently I read about this great promotion Business.com is offering for new advertisers. If you sign up for PPC Advertising through the affiliate link below you can get $100 in free clicks to your business website.
I signed up for it through someone else’s affiliate link about a month ago. I have already received a few leads, at least one more client, and I’ve only used up $18 of my 100 bucks so far! This is such a great deal, I signed up for their affiliate program so I can pass this promotion along to you too. You’d have to be pretty lazy or just plain rich if you don’t take the 10 minutes to sign up and get it. That’s like throwing away a one hundred dollar bill!
You don’t have to use it right away, but I don’t think there is going to be many, if any, better offers from them down the road. So you can at least sign up for this now and use your free PPC ads when you are ready. Just be sure to check their terms.
But, If you’re not interested in pay-per-click advertising, right now you can also get $50 off a directory listing
. Business.com is SEO friendly and on my list of top web directories.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on November 25, 2009
It’s about 10:30 PM Pacific Time Tuesday, and Google Trends is showing about fifty percent of the hottest trends right now are searches that include Black Friday in the search term. I can imagine that percentage will be much greater tomorrow and the following two days.
So what is my point? My point is if you’re in retail and you don’t have an online Black Friday Deals ad, I’m not sure what they heck you are thinking, and you should be feeling a little bit sheepish right about now.
Black Friday, the day after the United States federal holiday Thanksgiving, is the considered by many to be the busiest retail shopping day of the year and marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
If the Google Trends information I noted at the beginning of this blog post doesn’t impress you, then check out some estimated traffic for this primarily affiliate website which comes up as the number one website in Google Search when searching for Black Friday deals.
According to Alexa BlackFriday.info is currently the 508th most visited website in the US, and rising quickly! And according to Compete’s estimates it had over 4 million unique visitors last November. That’s about 1.5 million more unique visits than Godaddy.com during the same month. Not to bad for an affiliate website, especially one you only have to update once a year.
I don’t know about you, but none of my own websites even get four million unique visitors in an entire year.
Does this site offer anything of value? Maybe a little, but most of us could put it together over the weekend between soccer practices and dinner.
Even so, they’re are making a lot of money by taking advantage of the Black Friday madness and what is has to offer retailers. All they have done was take a good domain name, build an over-the-weekend website and search engine optimize it. The best part about it is they only have to update it once a year.
As you can see, if you’re an online retailer and don’t have any Black Friday ads, you’re really missing out on a ton of business.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on September 11, 2009
The Craigslist Posting servers are currently busy. Please try again in 20 minutes. This is the message I have received every time I’ve posted my ads to Craigslist.org over the last several weeks.
I wonder if the constant slowdowns are going to cause Craigslist to change the way they offer their services and perhaps even start charging for more of them. While I know Craig Newmark has declined buyouts or charging for most ad posting services in the past, perhaps they wont technically be able to support it for much longer.
I’m definitely getting frustrated with continuous outages and have considered not posting there anymore. When I have to try over and over again to post one ad, it can takes up a lot of my time.
I think change is imminent and here are a couple of ways I see Craigslist changing their services in the future:
-Charging to post classified ads(even a minuscule amount can make a huge difference)
-Charging to post in more categories
-Delay between posts per account or IP address.
-Paid advertising throughout Craisglist and alongside free ad pages
Let’ be clear, I don’t hope they make these changes; I like my free services. I’m just saying they’re going to need to do something soon. Even if they beef up their servers, that’s going to cost money and that money is going to have to come from somewhere.
If you’re also having trouble posting to Craigslist at times, you can see if there are any outages by checking their system status.
I’m not complaining. The folks over at Craigslist have been offering us a great free service for some time now, and I’m appreciative of that. I’m just wondering how much longer they can technically sustain offering such a great service this way.
If it keeps up I bet more people are going to start using Backpage.com for their free classifieds.
