Kick Ass Social Commerce for E-preneurs by John Lawson

Author:John Lawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2013-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

“Sell” Yourself Some Ad Space!

Now, everyone who has a popular blog—celebrity gossip or not— makes money selling ad space on their sites. You know those ads are just all over the place, and no one who uses the Internet expects anything different. The space is valuable real estate. I had a dilemma when it came to online advertising for my business at the time. My product mix just could not support the cost of paid online ads. I sold items costing less than $10, and many cost less than $5. Even at $0.05 a click on Google AdWords, it was too expensive to get enough customers to justify spending the money. Of course, my blog was the answer.

Once my new celebrity blog began generating traffic, I simply put my own ads into those spaces on my blog where everyone expects to see ads. Yep, you get the picture? All the banner ads were ours. All the underlined links went to our company, and all the ads top and bottom on the blog posts were for us, too. So the blog was not at all about our business or products, but we created blog content to function as bait to get consumers in our target demographic to read it and see our ads. And by getting the relevant content to our chosen King Consumers we got lots and lots of traffic. This is content in context, and you already know that means money.

It was much cheaper to pay our freelance writer $250 a month to make content we could use to place our ads for lead generation than it would have been to buy ads on someone else’s site. This technique was freaking brilliant! I was floored with how well it worked. The conversion rate of this blog was higher than anything we ever got with paid ads. And it really cost us a fraction of a penny to get leads. In just six weeks, the blog was getting more than eleven thousand hits a month. Of that crowd, 9 percent were clicking on the ads, and of that group 11 to 12 percent became new buyers. That’s money!

So if you do that math—and trust me, I did—11,000 readers brought in 990 clicks and 109 of those people clicking made a purchase. Our average cart size was $14 at the time, so that was generating $1,526 from basically $250 worth of paid blog posts. The cool thing was that every week the traffic was getting better!

We moved along happy and healthy for about four months. That’s just about the time I learned the lesson I shared with you earlier about WordPress.org versus WordPress.com. Suddenly, I got a call from my blog writer that she couldn’t log into our blog. When I went to investigate, I learned all of our activity on our blog had actually violated the terms by which I could use WordPress.com. I tell you this, just so you know, so many of my lessons were learned this hard

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