Where will you be Advertising now?

Just caught Rene running some good ads for land, and I've got a few friends that have some places up for rent, and need to get some ads run. Always sent them here.

And for the store owners running sales and new announcements. This forum feed was awesome. Whether you read the classifieds or not - trust me on this....people did!

What's the next best thing? All I can think of to reach a large number of eyes at once, is a paid Classified ad, but for some people that's not instant gratification, like you would get here. I don't recall LL addressing this much, in the close-down discussions.

I might as well make use of it...whilst it lasts!

Yeah, it's a shamble that LL have closed off both Xstreet & SL forum classified sections. Whilst i can afford paying for Classifieds (I bought one of those too for these lands)....i know many smaller Merchants & land owners or businesses cannot afford to pay for relatively ineffective in-world Classified Adverts.

To me, these changes plus several other policy changes made during the last 18 months are geared to handicap the smaller enterprises and individuals.

Yeah, some ads were seen by as many as a couple dozen people. Awesome!

Even if you can afford the paid Classifieds....they don't work that well for "timely" promotions. For instance, if you are having a sale for the next 48 hours....I'm not so sure that a paid classified is going to fit the bill on that.

This is a HUGE kick in the gut for merchants - small or large. I see it as much more devastating to sales figures than the Xstreet listing fees being added.

I've posted recently in many forums classifieds (products wanted) for a little experimentation, so far I got 1 PM and 2 replies from SL Universe, 1 contact inworld(i think) and 1 reply from SecondCitizen.

Nothing from blogrums or other forums.Well, I got another contact inworld but forgot to ask.

That's for what it's worth.. it would not necessarily be the same for you.

Actually all merchants seem to be at avatar united exchanging friendships and products offers to each others. The RSS feed feature is quite interesting I'm experimenting with it.

Anya - most of mine ended up at about 15 to 35 views. I know for a fact, that I picked up some long time customers from these ads. All it takes is one or two new customers in the store, from each ad....and you've built a new relationship. One that could last for a year or longer. If you ran two ads a week, and only picked up two customers from each ad, that's still 16 new customers a month that are buying, then they go tell 16 others, and so on.

I just scanned down the category that Rene is in, and an ad he ran a few days ago had 48 hits.

For banners I use SLU, Metabolt and rotate on a lot of different blogs and we use a lot of ad boards in world but mainly for branding only. As far as ads go I just want them in front of as many people as possible and the great thing is that its relatively inexpensive to get the ads in front of lots of eyes so we get seen as we grow and because its so inexpensive overall it is good value imo as long as I do not expect high returns on them

The most expensive so far is the sim we have sponsored for the upcoming Relay for Life but as its for a good cause that makes the expense worthwhile

That's now, when most people already know the forums are closing, it use to be a little more .
All it takes is 1 view...to convert into a sale!

I bought a ton of things, because of the classified sections over the years....so I wouldn't be to ready to knock it's effectiveness!

Lord - I was thinking about this the other night. Have you ever seen a device that is like a scrolling ad feed, or banner runner, that can be placed inside a store? I could start placing individual ads around the store for these folks - I'm getting pretty good numbers of eyes, lately. But was thinking that a board in a high traffic part of the store, that ran constant banners or just simple lines of scroll....would catch the eyes. And eventually, some customers might tp to it directly, just to catch the current sales or promotions for the day.

Has anyone seen anything like that? I haven't. I've only seen basic ad boards.

...and I sold 1 land because of it....you'll notice the plots available in the Title has gone down in the 2nd sequence of ads.

It's amazing when you think that 1,427,816 logged the last 60 days. Unfortunately we won't get the pages views on blogrums.

I think Gert Laval does something along these lines with place an ad board and put your ad on it for free and it is networked and seen in many locations and he does PG, Mature and Adult boards as well as Musicians IIRC. Thats the only sort of thing I have seen. Please IM Constanza in world if you are going to run some ad boards as we will take one for slapt with you

Exactly. It only takes one, some times. That person might refer a dozen friends to you, and on and on. And it was free.

Thanks, Lord. I'm going to look into this.

The message to LL, as far as "eyes" go....is that whatever page they need "eyes" at, simply turn it into a free classified ad running board, and they will get the eyes. It provides a service, and while the eyes are reading it, LL can pimp whatever they like - I don't care. I would certainly go there, once a day to check it out. I constantly found new stuff here, in the classifieds, and malls and land and events, too.

Twisted, until LL gets the kinks worked out of that place, as far as avatar and business name verification goes, and some safety recommendations for people pulling their adventuresome personas out of SL and pimping them out to the real world, without a log-in or verification process....I'm holding off on participating with or promoting that resource. I'm sure it will work for some.

Problem with SL generally is the Marketing aspect....there are no real effective tools that can hit a good percentage of the grid. I'm talking 1000's of sets of eyes simultaneously. The only form of marketing that gets tons of views are those top-8 classified adverts on the front of the Search engine (default page) in which you need to spend a few 100K's ot get a lot of views and TP's over an entire week (hence it's competitive nature)

Fashionista Blogs don't generate those sort of numbers nor do forums and even those 10000-member in-world advertising groups don't (as they're made up mostly redundant Avies & the % of online users at any given moment are really minuscule amounts.)

There's nothing here that's as effective like say your daily National newspapers or TV commericals or Radio advertising in RL. I think getting a few 100 views for a single event is about the best you can really hope for out of SL.

Events are being sterilised too.....so that's another form of advertising that soon will be blocked. Can you see the pattern?...again as it was also a free service...admittedly it was severely abused.

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2010/01/25/canning-the-spam-in-the-events-calendar

Not that bad at all when you think about it, that's people who have taken an interest in the advert rather than just read past it and they've done it without the search engine.

Well, I just don't get it, Rene. They want all the tools to be used from out of world, twitter, facebook, avatars united.....to improve communication. Yet, the most valuable tools that were already in place, and proved to be effective, are being removed. Just does not make sense!

I'm on his system. It's free if you want to share the space with a lot of other people. If you pay a little bit you get better exposure. But it's a nice setup either way.

I have no clue where I *will* advertize in the future, but I know one place I am not likely to do so: The banner ads on XStreet. I had a 200,000 impression banner there. It lasted all of three days, over a weekend, and got a pathetic 147 clickthroughs (50 of which I am certain they "seeded" on setup), and precisely ZERO sales or follow up contacts based on the ad having been seen.

Is that abyssmal clickthrough rate typical of other banner ads? Do other sites get better results?

My biz partner and I had running this board a long time in our shop - it is elegant and mod and its function is a real eye catcher. We removed it only because it didn't fit any longer in our new shop design. If you need one only for your land/shop (because it is non-networked) I would recommend this.

As far as I know it can give out landmarks as well and has some other comfy functions.

https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=150295

Well LL don't really care how we advertise or how we sell products......the mask behind Twitter, Facebook and AU is that LL hopes to generate more new SL users at relatively next to nothing marketing costs. Don't forget this is a company that has relied heavily on viral marketing over the years.....its very hard to squeeze real dollars out of them for real marketing & advertising (e.g WOW with TV adverts or IMVU with internet banner adverts)



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Yes. i often wondered about the effectiveness of those Xstreet banner ads....i wasn't really compelled to spend that sort of money on minimal returns. I spent lower amounts on their feature listings.....even those weren't overly impressive as one's listing seem deeply buried in Search.


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Thanks Wynochee. I found a few others like that on Xstreet, too. I'm visualizing something a bit different. Maybe I can talk a scriptor into making it happen.