A Million Dollars in Small Classified Ads!
Friday, January 23, 2009 11:58So in my never ending quest to find new traffic sources I decided to go out on the line and try a small classified ads! I mean if it worked for that guy on tv its got to work for me!
So here is the low down… after finding out about NationWideAdvertising.com and for the first time actually seeing how much these things cost I figured what the heck. So I set aside some testing cash and dug threw their site and their listings. My target was to capture old ladies that like coupons so I decided to advertise in the Penny Saver. For $250 I was going to have my little ad in 3 million of these bad boys.
The offer I picked to promote with this idea was the Cash4Gold offer at Convert2Media. Old ladies, coupons, money for old jewelry… it all seemed like a perfect match. I wrote my ad, which was pretty simple ‘Domain.com – Do you have old unused jewelry? etc etc’ you get the point.
I went cheap with the idea and just bought 1 domain that was really short and redirected it to the offer page. No phone number was in the ad but the domain name was listed twice. So ive got my ad, ive got my lp, all I needed to do was wait for all of the people that read penny saver to find my ad and get their gold pack!
Well…its been 2 weeks since the ad ran. I was told it was going to run for a week in all mid west penny savers and get me my 3 million prints. The results for sure are now in!
1 Click. That’s right. With my $250 my domain in my text ad got 1 click. I don’t even know if the click came from the penny saver ad or from a reviewer at the company. But it didn’t convert so it doesn’t matter anyway.
So what happened? Well it seems no one really reads the penny saver. I had assumed anyone who did in that small 5-10% of them would be the perfect target but it seems they were not. Also I realized that most of these people were problem not big computer users. So just having a website probably wasn’t the wisest choice.
Lesson learned?
- Don’t do print with out a phone number.
- Pick a paper that you actually get so you have proof your ad even ran.
- Pick a paper that more people read or even pay to read.
- Its not easy to make a million dollars in small print ads.
Good luck if your planing to try it. Ill stick to people already at their computers.
quiet affiliate says:
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Advertise offers like that in publications with ‘average joe finance tips’ or job classifieds…..also i don’t think it’s all the little old ladies who are the target demo for that one. sorry to hear about it.. don’t give up though, media buys can work REALLY well if done correctly
tangy says:
January 24th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
i’m going to check out doing some local stuff over the next little while too… i’ll shoot you an update on how it goes
jesse grant says:
January 26th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I also tried advertising in my local classifieds for a teeth whitening offer , same kinda deal bought a domain and forwarded the offer and spent 250 and i have only made like 100$ from it lol, the ad still has 5 days left but I highly doubt I will advertise locally again in newspapers.
Lorne Fade says:
January 29th, 2009 at 3:49 am
tough break. offline promotions blow.
the only time i made money promoting stuff offline was partypoker signups using cards they sent me that i proceeded to stick on peoples windshields in the casino parking lot :p
Off-White Hat says:
February 1st, 2009 at 1:25 am
Dang! I was actually JUST looking into a Pennysaver ad the other day. Good to know. Although, I have heard some success stories with this method. I guess it probably just takes a little bit of testing.
quiet affiliate says:
February 18th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
BTW, general rule of thumb, unless you’re selling your old car, i’d shy away from anything that has to do with pennysaver
try your local ‘indie mags’ or if you’re in a big enough city, those neighborhood (i.e. the inman park registry instead of the atlanta morning news) papers… better rates and you’ll know the demo already