I recently got leaflets printed for Cashback Shopper and just had them distributed through a local magazine, which is delivered to 10,000 homes in my local area. The leaflets cost approx £170 & the distribution £290, so I’ve calculated that I need 100 people, or 1% of the recipients to sign up to the site, in order to cover my costs.

Although I’ve done some leaflet posting myself over the last year or two, this is the largest scale leafleting I’ve done & it will be interesting to see what results it obtains. I’m really running out of ideas for advertising which doesn’t cost ridiculous amounts of money (ie Adwords), or has little or no results :/

If I don’t cover my costs (again!), then I certainly won’t bother with this again & think I’ll just have to rely on totally cost free methods (???) or not bother at all anymore!

UPDATE – 5th July

So far, there has been no increase above the norm in the number of people signing up to the site. It looks like I’ve just wasted another £400! I really don’t know what marketing method works any more…..I’ve had so many phone calls from marketing companies telling me their wonder stories, yet not a single one has proven to be of any use whatsoever; all I’ve done is thrown money into a black hole it seems!

I’m sure everyone knows about the phenomenon that is Facebook! Now one of the worlds most visited websites, it seems that everyone & his dog is facebooking, poking, posting & answering incredibly pointless quizzes! Does anyone in Britain’s offices NOT have a minimised window open for a sneaky look when the boss isn’t around?!

So, when Facebook started taking ads, it seemed only sensible to consider this as a new advertising arena for affiliate marketeers. I originally set up a couple of ads for Cashback Shopper, but these were rejected by Facebook for contravening their terms & conditions / It would appear that because my cashback site contains a section on Gambling sites, it cannot be advertised, presumably due to the Americans laws on internet gambling!!!! Don’t get me started on how ridiculous I think that is!

However, I decided to leave the Facebook ads for a while but placed a few yesterday relating to My Travel Extras.

Facebook ads let you target the ad to a users interests, so I decided to create a separate ad for each product on the site. For example, Theatre Tickets targets “people age 18 and older in the United Kingdom who like Billy Elliot, Buddy Holly, Dirty Dancing, Going To The Theatre, Grease, Hairspray, High School Musical, Les Miserables, The Lion King, London, Lord Of The Rings, Musical Theater, Musical Theatre, Musicals, Nights Out, Oliver, Oliver Twist, Phantom Of The Opera, Restaurants, The Sound Of Music, Theater, Theatre, or Wicked.”

Facebook’s ad creation system is VERY picky about punctuation & proper use of capitals & symbols, so a few mistakes led to repeated rejections & a lot of frustration! However, once you are familiar with what you can & can’t do, it was pretty straightforward to create ads for Theatre Tickets, Car Hire, Theme Park Breaks, London Theatre Breaks, Airport Parking, Airport Hotels, Airport Lounges & Short Breaks.

Initial assessment of the stats shows that click through rates are pretty low compared to what you would be aiming for from Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, so the jury is still out. The best result so far is from Airport Lounges, with 0.12% click throughs! I’ll give the ads a week to see if they are worth continuing with.