What is your most effective advertising?

[wheel]

My absolute best form of advertising is Google adwords. And I work it like the dickens, spending a third to a quarter per click what others in my industry do. As another posted noted above, you need to do your research on this to be successful - but if you do it's a gold mine. For the best ebook on adwords, Google 'andrew goodman'. He's at pagezero media which is a Toronto company, but he's renowned internationally as an adwords expert.

Also as noted above, with adwords you can laser target your prospects and customers. Traditional print media smears your ad in front of the general population. With adwords, you only show your ad to people looking for your product. Very effective.

I also get word of mouth, but only rarely. These types of leads turn into sales almost 100% of the time but are very low volume so I don't spend any time trying to increase this.

I do well in the search engines, that helps a bit.

I've tried industry magazines. Spent thousands on ads, never made a sale. Bleh .

I've done a bit of reading on car ads. That sounds promising, I'm apt to be trying that this year or next.

[hamidrizvi]

Depends on the kind of business you are in. Passive advertising methods such as flyers, decals on car windows, catalogues, etc might work well, but at the same time usually have a very low response rate. I have seen a lot of business operaters use passive methods and give up after some time thinking that their business was at fault.

The best way to get word out and create hype about your business is using Active advertising, e.g. Going out and telling people yourself about the business. This gets the people more involved and interested. Obviously, you will not get to as large a audience as you would with passive advertising but you are more likely to have a higher response rate.

[TheLegace]

What kinda of marketing do you suggest for Web Designers, I am going to start one soon, I was hoping for some tips.

Thanx

[wheel]

What kinda of marketing do you suggest for Web Designers, I am going to start one soon, I was hoping for some tips.

Thanx

Likely your best bet is referrals. Web design is tough work from a prospecting viewpoint. There's a million of them out there plus you're competing with $3.95 hosting and $29.95 templates, and the business owner's 16 year old neighbour, etc. Free work for charities and non-profits, that kind of thing.

You might also try adwords advertising on Google, but I expect it's a tough market.

[Canucklehead]

There are also sites where you can bid on projects. Aside from the potential to actually GET some work that way, having your website listed allows people to browse through your work - FREE advertising!

Incorporating your message (web design) into every piece of communication that you do will also increase exposure to your services. Avatars, email signatures, Skype addresses, MSN, voicemail, etc.

Wheels' suggestion of free work is great. Some specific examples would be lion's club and local united way agencies. Read the community meetings section of your local newspaper and offer up your services. Do it for free on favorville and build up your portfolio.

A lot of local flyers that I get include web addresses - many are crap. Go to the website, if it's crap, see what you would do to change it and send it to the advertiser. You never know - they might call you to help them with their website. If not, it still keeps your creative juices flowing and who knows, you might get a referral out of it.

[cdnNick]

You can also email some web hosts that don't offer web design and see if you can partner with them referring your hosting to them and they refer design to you.

[wheel]

There are also sites where you can bid on projects.

Yeah, elance and a few others I think. I'd be careful though, I've looked at those sites previously (considered posting jobs, and sometimes to see if there's anything interesting) and the project posters are all people who's #1 priority is the lowest bid, and the bulk of the bidders you'll be up against are from countries where $1/hour is good money.

I'm tangenting into offshore vs. local, but that's going to be a big problem for anyone looking for work in this field. I've personally been offered full time experienced web developer services for $750 per month. And I know people who use these - how are you going to compete with that? Personally I use local talent because I think in most cases using overseas talent will waste too much of my time and I've seen many examples of shoddy work - but I'm the exception to the rule. Most people who see a quote come back at $500 when you know it'll take 3 weeks of your time, well, you're not going to get the job.

Tough market to be in these days. Everybody trying to save a dollar on your back.

[TheLegace]

I am grateful for the wealth on information, I was hoping it would be easier. I mean I can design pages well, at the moment I am working on building a portfilio. Using CSS, I am able to make dynamic ecommerce pages, I know a lot of HTML and slowly starting to understand PHP and Java, to make my own custom dynamic webpages. I was planning on using software for ecommerce websites like Cubecart and make custom layouts based on that. I know people, but I dont want to be local.

[Canucklehead]

... $1/hour is good money.

I'm tangenting into offshore vs. local

I've already tangented offshore printing, inflatables and am working on back-end programmers now. Key challenge for me has not been quality but leadtimes and minimums (printing). No experience yet on web designers - we'll see how well they can take direction.

$750/month is good but how about productivity? I guess as long as you get about 10 pages done/month you're laughin'