I have written about buying and selling ads through Project Wonderful before. When I wrote that, I focused primarily on either selling ads on your own blog or on advertising your business (especially Etsy shops!).
I recently tried an experiment though, and wanted to share Project Wonderful as a great way to promote your blog.
I took a 125 pixel x 125 pixel button to promote my blog and added it to the Project Wonderful site. I picked approximately 10 blogs as those that I wanted to try to advertise on. At least half of those were ones that I read. I figured if they are blogs that interest me, then the readers of those blogs might be interested in mine.
I also decided that I was going to do some long term bidding. As someone who sells ads through Project Wonderful, I know that there are many people who only buy ad space on a blog for a few hours. To me, that just doesn’t seem like an effective option. Sure, if you buy for less time, then you can buy on many different sites for the same amount of money. But, knowing that sometimes people need to see the same ad a few times before they click on it, I felt that long term bidding would be more effective.
I bid on all of the blog ads for a one month period, but also set a limit on most of them that I didn’t want to spend more than $1.00 (although I set it for $1.20 on one blog where I was bidding a higher amount, and $2.80 on another blog). I like that I can set both a time limit and a spending limit, so that it will end whenever the first one is met.
The results?
Time on the Ad Campaign: 15 days
Money Spent on Ads: $8.07
Times the Ad Was Shown on Blogs: 78,484 times
(Of those, how many were unique views: 64,009 times)
Unique Click Throughs to My Blog: 102
Of course, one thing that can’t be measured is the number of people who didn’t click, but may have looked at the ad who might later see “Many Little Blessings” listed somewhere or might even come to my blog and recognize my Laundry Mama, and think, “Hey — now where did I see that blog before?”
I saw an increase in traffic during those two weeks (possibly from some of those 102 not just visiting once, but also returning later), and also saw an increase in subscribers. It could have nothing to do with that, but it was fun to have the ads out there. Plus, I enjoyed having ads on blogs that I knew (and knew that the money was going to people I knew).
What are some inexpensive ways that you have found to promote your blog?
(One of my favorites is actually commenting on other blogs, which takes no money, but does take lots of time. So, there is always some “expense.”)
This post is linked to Works for Me Wednesday at We are THAT Family
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