$10 marketing experiment

In the beginning...

I am starting to write this now as I wanted a running story of this experiment. Over the last few weeks I have started blogging/tweeting/Facebooking in an attempt to see if it is possible to make money from it. My ultimate goal is still to start a service helping other people to do the same. I have been doing this for a few weeks and am surprised everyday by what I am learning.

I first made a blog. That’s it. Just made a blog and put up two posts a week. In the first week I had 20 hits. Really? I thought it was crazy. I really had done nothing. I was still messing around with the design and the header and everything. Next step was the twitter account. I have been against twitter from the beginning. Why? Because everything in the news was about this or that celebrity saying something stupid on twitter. Or someone boasting because they had x number of twitter followers. It seemed so shallow. But in researching my blogging challenge, EVERYONE tweets! Every business, small and large use it. So I gave it a try. I had 10 followers in 2 weeks. Again, crazy to me. So I kept reading and trying new things. I learned about hashtags and re-tweeting. I found an application, hootsuite, that lets me schedule tweets to go out throughout the day. At this point I was spending about an hour or two a day on this project. I enjoyed the research aspect.

I started a Facebook page next. A few days in and I had zero followers/likes. Problem one, I found I had messed up my link to my Facebook page so all my tweets about it were directed to someone else. Your welcome other guy who may have got some more followers. Problem two, I had no idea how to drive people to a Facebook page! I didn’t want to mix my personal life with my blogging life so I wasn't going to post on my personal page. So the only idea left to me was advertising.

Three weeks in and I was starting to look at advertising. Yeah, a little soon, but it gave me something else to blog about and would hopefully get me moving faster in the direction of making money. I looked at googles AdSense and facebooks advertising. Throughout the weekend I thought about whether or not I should advertise. I did not talk to my husband about it. I knew he would tell me I was stupid to try and advertise my nothing business. He would also likely tell me not to waste the money on it right now.  So I didn’t tell him. I am a smart wife.

So, I thought, and researched, and thought, and played internet flash games, and thought. Then I decided that I would start with a $10 a month advertising budget for my small business. It is only $10 bucks, and I acknowledge that I would really be throwing $10 bucks out the window, but I really wanted to try advertising.  So I thought I would start on Facebook. My Facebook page has a button on the bottom: advertise on Facebook. I read up and they had a monthly budget option. I went through the form and filled in the boxes. Was a little exciting to do this, to put my name out there and ADVERTISE. It makes my business feel more real somehow. I hit the button to go to the next screen and got a large red screen of disappointment. $10 a month is too small amount for Facebook. I imagine someone at the Facebook office laughing at the tiny blogger trying to advertise on Facebook. I don’t see why Facebook refuses to take my $10 but if they don’t want it, then that is their loss.

Back to the drawing board. I decide I am going to stick with my $10 a month advertising budget. I have also decided to make it a goal of staying with the budget and starting a blog series about it. This is the first installment. I will post every month about how I use my $10 budget and how successful it is for me. I hope that this can help other bloggers who want to grow on a tiny budget.

Part Two:

Phase one – research

I talked a little about Facebooks advertising program. I could never find what the minimum monthly budget amount was. So I gave up on Facebook. Next I checked out Google AdWords. They also allow you to do a budget style program. But they do it daily. It appeared that their minimum was $10 a day. That is way too much for me. Both Facebook and AdWords are Cost-per-click (CPC) programs. That means that you, the business, pay for every time someone clicks on your ad. I do like this setup, I just wish they had a smaller scale. I understand that I am really small fish at this time though. So it is on to look at other options that fit with my small size.

Next my investigation led me to WordStream (wordstream.com). They have a pay-per-click (PPC) program, which is the same as a CPC program. They do have a free 7 day trial with no credit card required. But, after looking through their site, they are a PPC management company. That doesn’t pay for any clicks, that just pays for them to manage your PPC/CPC campaigns.  PPC management seems to be a big industry. As I search there are a fair amount of these management companies out there.  

Then I stumbled upon this pretty awesome idea called Fiverr. (Fivver.com) At first I was confused on what it was so I dismissed it and went on in my search. But I came back to it after reading another review of it. Fiverr is a site that lets you advertise to do pretty much anything for $5. That's it. The website makes a dollar off every transaction.  Check back to see how it worked.

Month one:

Since I started this half way through the month so I only spent $5. I spent it on Fiverr.com. I paid $5 to have a short (Twitter size) sentence with link. It was sent out on Facebook and twitter, reportedly to thousands of people. The seller does give links to confirm that the job was done. It was done on time and as promised in the ad. I had zero response. I don't blame the seller at all. I think I figured out where I went wrong. The target audience of the seller was more of an age group then people related based on anything else. If I try Fivver.com again, I will look for a more targeted audience that would be more likely to read my blog.