Go beyond Google Adwords and take a look at the underground advertising portals for your most niche customers
Google Adwords might still be the best platform for generating traffic to your website, but there are several other growing ad networks with very niche communities that you might want to start checking out. The downfall to Google Adwords is that you’re really relying on keywords and geographic location in terms of how specific you can target clicks, and this can get expensive. The smaller you can make your target, the less you’ll spend and the more qualified leads you’ll be sending back to your website.
Let’s check out these up and coming Ad platforms that serve the super-niche need:
1. Facebook Ads
No surprise here, but Facebook Ads are great at bringing in exactly who you want, and nobody else. If the name of your cooking magazine was Vegan Yuppie Woman, you might target women, aged 22-35, single or married, no kids, in every large metropolitan area who claims to be a “vegan” or has the interest of “vegan cooking”, “tofurkey” or likes the “PETA” Facebook page.
So you might only be targeting 3200 people, but your click rate and conversion rates will be much higher than if you were using something more general like Google Adwords.
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site that is completely random. Users install a button in their browser that says “Stumble” and when they hit it, they’re brought to a random page. This random page is generated by the users of StumbleUpon, who are submitting interesting web pages constantly.
When someone Stumbles Upon a page that they like, they can “like” the page. The more likes a page gets, the more often it will show up when someone starts Stumbling. As you can imagine, the pages that “make it” on this site and get the most visibility are usually unique, visually appealing, and one-of-a-kind.
However, StumbleUpon offers paid inclusion through their ad platform. It’s recommended that (like other PPC campaigns) you create a unique landing page specific to StumbleUpon, because unlike other PPC ads, your web page is the ad. With StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, you get guaranteed views to the types of people and related interests that you choose.
Google Analytics is completely integrated and their Standard pricing plan starts out at the ridiculously low price of just $1 a day for 10 views and go up from there. Definitely try out StumbleUpon once or twice before dropping any dough so that you can see what types of pages people Stumble most often and how you can best appeal to the community.
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3. Twitter Promoted Tweets & Profiles
If your budget is $5,000 or more, you might take a look at the Twitter Ad platform. With this, you can promote your tweets, accounts and even your hashtags (for events, perhaps) which will gain them greater visibility across the network. With a promoted account, Twitter will recommend that more people follow you, while the other two will show up more in feed form.
The trouble with this platform, while it will gain you mucho exposure and has been compared to buying a commercial during the superbowl, is that Twitter is completely transparent about which tweets and accounts are “promoted”, so you won’t be fooling anyone.
4. Digg Dialog
The social bookmarking giant Digg.com runs an advertising platform similar to Google Ads, but where they differ is with the added advertising opportunity called Digg Dialog. Using their popular web shows, you can basically sponsor the show and get featured in more casual, believable ways.
Another neat one is the ability to “sponsor” popular posts, which gives you a little extra boost in visibility but we’re not sure how useful that really is as an advertising opportunity in the publishing business where we create enough content of our own.
5. Reddit Ads
Reddit is a little bookmarking community that’s been developed by its users much like Twitter has. For example, instead of hashtags, they have subreddits, which are pretty much bookmarks, photos, or posts based around a single topic, which Reddit organizes and curates via user ratings.
So in every Reddit topic (there are thousands of them), you have the opportunity to advertise. There’s a topic for knitting, there’s one for woodworking, and even Japanese Food. And if there’s a topic, you can probably advertise in it, which basically gives you the top text link (ad) on the page, which is highlighted in blue.
In terms of pricing, Reddit makes more logistical sense in terms of targeting. If you want to target a specific topic, you need to spend more, or have a bigger budget, and the minimum is $30 per day (for a minimum of 3 days) with an average CPC of around $0.13 cents. If you want your ad to show up across the whole site, your budget only needs to be $20 per day (for a minimum of 3 days).
My recommendation for Reddit, much like StumbleUpon, is to spend some time on the site, or find someone who spends a lot of time on Reddit before writing your ad headline. You’ll find that this audience is attracted to more abstract headlines.
So what about you? What advertising platforms have snuck up on you and surprised you lately?
