• Classified Sites, Message Board and Forums
Classified ad sites, message boards and forums can be surprisingly effective. The keyword here is targeting. One must target your ad to the target audience; therefore ads in sites with related categories in general would be the most effective. Advertisement in other sites such as web site design would be far less effective. It is essential to write eye-catching ads that stand out. It may be a good idea to couple the ad with a discount coupon. One added bonus of this approach is that the effectiveness of various campaigns can be monitored.
A lot of companies seem to think that this approach is effective and spend a lot of time and money. In experience, the response rate is very poor (around one in a million) and none of our customers have returned for further purchases. Furthermore, your web site may be forced to shut down or the ISP will threaten to withdraw its services due to a lot of complaint. There is also a lot of potential damage to the image of your company.
This could be a very effective means of promotion if you have your own opt-in mailing list from your site. However, this list will take some time to build. The key would be to give news on new editions and discounts from time to time. Response rates of as much as 15% have been reported. Another approach could be to pay an advertising agency to send e-mails to third party opt-in lists. However this is very expensive in comparison to other methods of advertising.
Banners are the most widely used form of advertising but is also the poorest. The click-through rate is very poor and the industrial average is around 0.4%. Even after a click-through, their response rate is reported to be poor relative to other forms of promotion. Despite their poor response rates, banners remain the most popular of advertising because there is no form of advertising that can generate such a massive exposure. There are only a finite number of searches performed on a search engine on a given day but there are thousands of high traffic sites that can take banners. One can use banner advertising sparingly in the beginning until satisfied that the response rate justifies the cost of the campaigns.
Pop-ups generate a higher response rate but are generally annoying to web surfers and may damage the reputation of the company. Again one can only use pop-ups sparingly in the beginning until one is satisfied with the response rate. Despite the well-known poor response rate of Banners and Pop-ups, it is still necessary to use Banners and Pop-ups because this is the only way of generating huge exposure on the Internet. However, this has to be conducted extremely carefully.
Shopping such as Yahoo shopping and Amazon provide a highly effective means for third party online retailers to sell their products. However, these sites are not open to retailers based in Hong Kong . Auction sites such as eBay provide a useful means to sell products. However, prices realized on auction sites are generally very low and therefore auctions will normally be reserved for unsold stock.
• Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs are now recognized as one of the most efficient means of generating sales. A web site owner is paid for a fixed amount or percentage of every sale he generate. Affiliate programs are now thought to account for up to one-third of all Internet transactions. The downside of affiliate programs is that they can be very expensive and complicated to maintain, and are also subjected to a high level of credit card fraud.
• Other online methods
Other online methods of promotion include hit-exchanges, banner-exchanges, FFA sites. However, the response rates of these programs are low and those that take part in them tend to be very small business promoting multi-level marketing, promotional techniques or even fraud. Therefore it is not advised to participate in these programs.
• Off-line Advertising
Off-line advertising includes advertising in magazines, newspapers, billboards and even television. One may consider advertising in magazines devoted to a related field in different countries