Where and how banners work

As some of you know, I have promoted Wiki-Clix like crazy since May 2nd, and I've gotten awesome results.

Now, I'm not a marketing guru, so don't take any word I write in this article as scientific conclusions.

I got a lot more referrals from promoting Wiki-Clix at AdHitz than anywhere else. There's no close second.

Now, AdHitz is not free. It's an ad network. You create campaigns for a text ad or a banner ad. Most ( all ? ) of the time, each click you get will cost you $0.03. I have kept creating campaigns at $4 each, setting it that I don't spend more than $2 a day. It never got close to $2 a day. The biggest number of clicks has always been with a banner.

Now, not just any banner. I tried this one first:





I didn't get many clicks with it. I then tried this one:



It worked fabulously!!! I was getting between 9 and 24 referrals a day. No kidding.

Wiki-Clix being in pre-launch, Teo changed his mind and decided he would pay $0.04 maximum instead of $0.05. The number of referrals went down. I concluded the people saw the banner and when they arrived on the home page, they concluded the banner was a lie, which was the case, indeed.

I asked Teo for a new banner mentioning it was $0.04, he gave me this one:





I was getting some success with it, about 4 to 7 referrals per day. Well, it's not bad, but I had a hunch it could be better. So, I used Paint on my PC and modified the original successful banner:



If you want to use it, you'll find it here:

http://achieve-work-life-balance.com/images/PTC/wiki-clix/banner1_004.jpg


I'm back to between 8 and 12 referrals a day.

Something great is happening. I used to have more than 50% of members as referrals at Wiki-Clix. It changed 2 days ago. I'm slightly under 50%, and the difference is increasing. This is very good news, cause it means word is spreading.

Back to the original subject of the article. What I conclude from my experiences with Wiki-Clix banners is that, it has to talk to the people, and it has to be true. So, in my humble opinion, no offense meant to Teodor, saying something like "Your online Business (Ad)Venture" but nothing else doesn't talk to people. I understand his objective, though. For Wiki-Clix to be sustainable, there must be advertisers as well as members, else, Teo would pay the members and Wiki-Clix would fold, which is what happens to most PTC sites that suffered that fate, I think.

Something else I found in my experiments. A few days ago, I started promoting 3 PTC sites:







I think PersonaBux is fairly new.

ClixSense has been around since 2007.

InfinityBux has 180,000 members.

Well, I have 15 referrals at PersonaBux, 2 referrals at InfinityBux, and 1 referral at ClixSense.

When I discussed with Jun, a good friend who's also a member here, he has a lot of experience with PTCs. He told me it's more challenging to get referrals for ClixSense.

Myself, I conclude these things for these 3 PTC sites I now promote:

1. Many people look for something new, InfinityBux and ClixSense have been around longer. It probably explains why the owner of InfinityBux has other PTC sites as well.
2. The PersonaBux is not only new, but more attractive, in my opinion.

Back to the subject of low cost PPC ad networks. Yes, I know, it's not free. But one thing I want to mention, that to me, has its importance.

Let's say you surf a Traffic Exchange ( TE ) to get credits. You then assign those credits to splash pages, text ads or banners, or any combination, to find out what works best. Let's talk about banners, to be able to compare with AdHitz.

You choose to convert your credits to banner impressions. Your banner will be shown 5,000 times. It means that 5,000 different pages will show your banner to members surfing. When they are all shown, and it doesn't take long on popular TEs, you check and see you got a few clicks, between 0 and 3, more if you're lucky.

Let's compare with AdHitz. The ads we put on their site show on thousands of sites that publish their ad blocks. Text ads show on about 2,000 sites, banners on 1,000 sites, approximately.

At $0.03 per click, $4 will get you 133 clicks. When the banner works like Wiki-Clix and PersonaBux, meaning the person who clicks is really interested, you will get more conversions. Yes, you have spent money. But think about it. Getting 100 clicks on one TE will take how many impressions ? Imagine the hours you will spend surfing on that one site, while my banner appears on 1,000 sites.

You might say, "But you spend money, I don't". Yes, I do. But consider this. I spent about $70 dollars so far advertising Wiki-Clix. I got $110. Now, if I stopped advertising, I would still have 400 referrals. Not all of them are clicking, that's a reality you'll meet on any site, PTC, social network, whatever. Many people, myself included, join sites but are not active, for all kinds of reasons. Let's say 30% of people click every day at Wiki-Clix. It means, at $0.04 ( if we say that free members get 4 clicks per day ) per member per day, I will make $144 a month, not counting my own clicks. I'm a Founder, I make $0.04 per click, I can click on 25 ads per day, that's $30 per month.

$174 per month. How much time do I spend? 20 seconds per ad, 25 ads per day, so about 1 hour a week. And I don't have to click as a Founder.

Who says there's no money to be made with PTCs ?