|
No no no. You don't undertsand what I've tested and shown: a forum is a forum, for talking, an advert is an advert, for selling. When you use a forum for selling, even when you do it in the most legitimate way (and I have profited in umpteen ways from forums and similar institutions) even then the value for money of the advertising you have put out, the worthwhile nature of your efforts is LOW.
Naturally there are niches where splogging (spam blogging - covers forum abuse also) works, usually only for cleaning up unwarranted ppc incomes, and/or spreading other splogging sites.
As I said, I sell a business service at literally the best UK price, and when I ran ads on google I got quote requests in a flash and sales hot on the heels of them. But on a little test of free forum advertising, using the "introduce your business" section of about a dozen uk business forums, I found that it was a total waste of time, most people who went to the site were being show a gratuitous advert for something they hadn't specifically chosen to look for, but on my ads on google only people who actually wanted that particular service even saw the advert.
Then again I'm the sort of developer who NEVER uses gratuitous adverts, and I would find most of the advertising even on this site we are on to be incredibly low paying compared to the revenues I clean up as a purist - I believe Google has exactly the same model, when you look at how they operate. Naturally the google adsense ads on this site still conform to my standards, but the graphic adverts will generate 1000th of the money I generate for the same affiliates, per click. It's all about performance. What I am saying, and I don't blame you for not knowing better just yet, is that the conversion rate for forum marketing is even lower than the conversion rate for ordinary gratuitous ads on account of the fact that most forum users are behaviorally very different from the mainstream traffic eg on search engines.
Why? Well for starters a LOT of the actual developers are in among the forums, all forums, no matter what topic - which means they are already heavily desensitized to advertising tricks, and secondly it means they are not really online on forums "by chance", it's where they/we hang out, and it's like a little staff room or common room, so we are not so interested in the ads on the walls as we are the other people.
I bet you that right now without checking back, you can remember the last 10 topics you posted on, on forums, and yet you would not be able to name a SINGLE advert you have seen on those forums - all off the top of your head.
It's about psychology... people have to be ensnared subtly - if you do it the obvious ways, it's never anywhere near as good.
When Google sends people to my business site which sells the lowest colour copies in all of britain, I get sales very fast, but when forums send people there, they just take a look and then bugger off again. The reason is obvious - google has a list of several 1000 targeted keywords I have taken about a year to carve out by hunting very carefully in among all the 'used' keywords. That means that when I pay google for 50 people those people all are looking for my service. Whereas on a forum where I advertise "lowest colour copying prices in britain" - and they even go on to have a discussion in which they research it and find i really am the absolute lowest, I still get no business.
Another sad truth about people who spend a lot of time on forums, above all business forums or developer forums, is that they are poor. None of the people I sell to on the phone, via google or in any other way spend their day on forums - or any noticeable part of their day. They are all firmly ratrace people with stringent schedules and no time to mess around out here.
Among us, the dregs, are of course one or two hardcore I.T. gurus who are way too rich to really be on forums, but they(we) come here anyway, because our heart and soul is out here in the online world. But the people who buy from me - the nearest they get to forums, these big spenders, is facebook.
But the bottom line is that forum marketing is NOT targeted marketing - because users who want to buy your service need to ask someone about buying that service before you can classify them as targeted. Forum traffic is actually bored people looking to kill time - that means if you sell genuine business services with value for money, you are far better off just paying google.
Back to my main topic - the saturation of spam/splogging is so intense now, due to mass western unemployment and a constantly growing indian "workforce" not to mention insane amounts of pure spam from the koreas, that even what little return sploggers get is set, this very year, to crumble into the dust.
Advertising is an art - art can never be destroyed by the stock-aitken-waterman style whores/sellouts who do what they do for money and not love (of their work)... people who are happy, for example, to take a pay of 10 cents where the market rate is 50 cents, so that by undercutting the genuine artisans they think they are monopolizing the market. But what is worthless always devalues. And what is worth something goes up. Whilst sploggers start at 10 cents and I start at 50 cents, the sploggers end at 1 cent (with twice as many work hours) and I end at 500 cents (with 1% of the workload ongoing).
Brains over braun anytime. Splogging is just braun. Nothing personal to any spammers here.
|
