David Pitlyuk

For those of you who don’t know, I own a few different businesses, both online and offline. One of those is Tri Megatech Technology Solutions, a company that offers technology support and solutions to home users, home offices, and small-mid sized businesses. We do things like coming to your house and removing viruses to setting up an intricate network for a company moving into a new office.

The majority of our business is very localized, meaning most of the money comes from people and businesses within a certain mile range of our location in Maryland. We do offer web design and development services, which can be done for anybody anywhere, but most of our money does not come from this. This means we have to do a lot of local advertising in order to get our name out there and generate enough business to cover our expenses and make a profit. We are a new business, so getting our name out there is very important at this stage because it’s also one that can generate much of its business through word-of-mouth…the most powerful type of advertising there is. In order to get new clients and customers through word-of-mouth, we have to get the work in the first place to leave a good impression.

This Sunday we’ll be running our first advertisement in the newspaper. We purchased a spot called a 2×3 (3.7″x3″) that will run through a few local papers here in Maryland this Sunday. The circulation for the paper is about 60,000, so we really hope to generate a decent amount of business out of this.

When it comes to advertising, it’s all about ROI (return on investment). I don’t care if I spend $1,000,000 on an advertisement, as long as I can make money (in a specified amount of time), I’m happy. This ad costed us about $200, so just getting a few simple jobs will make up for it. The jackpot would be to get some contracts with businesses out of it though. While lots of little jobs adds up, the direction we’re trying to move our company into is supporting small-large businesses as well as IT government contracting. Here’s the ad I created:

We’re offering 50% off of our prices because it’s important to us right now to generate a client list that will spread the word about our company. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most valuable type out there, and generates the most business…for free. We also wanted to target some businesses, so we’re offering free consultations. It was pretty hard to fit everything we wanted in one ad, and maybe it would have made more sense to actually get a few ads, make different creatives that target different services, then see how the results are for each. Just like online advertising, it’s most optimal when you tweak your ads every time in order to see what gets the best response (unfortunately in the offline world it’s much more expensive and time consuming to do this).

Hopefully I’ll be reporting back in the next week or two with some good news in regards to the newspaper ad. Stay tuned for a followup.

Selling products is all about advertising! People have to know about your products in order to get sales, right? One of our top selling products for ActiveTuning is our custom grounding kits for the Nissan Titan and Pathfinder Armada. Grounding kits better help the grounding system of cars, and in turn, can potentially offer some very nice benefits:

• Increased Horse Power & Torque
• Awesome Looks
• Faster Shifts on Automatics
• Improved Mileage
• Reduced Emissions
• Stronger & Faster Starts
• Smoother Idle
• More Responsive Acceleration
• Reduced Audio Noise
• Improved Electrical Accessory Performance (brighter lights, windows/sunroofs operate faster, better radio reception, etc.)

As an additional positive, many of the 04-06 Titan owners experienced some sort of clicking sound with their trucks. Installing our grounding kit on many of the trucks also got rid of that issue…which helps make it a top seller.

ClubTitan.org is a forum made specifically for Nissan Titan owners. Forum communities are in my opinion the single best way to market an aftermarket car product. Offer good service and a great product, and word of mouth spreads quick. We decided to sponsor ClubTitan for at least a month and see how it affects our Titan grounding kit sales. There are about 80,000 Titan’s sold a year, just a decent piece of that pie is great.

Sponsorship was $50 for a month, and you get a few benefits:

• You get a 468×60 banner in rotation throughout the forum
• You get a 150×85 banner on the homepage
• You have the ability to post in the forums as a sponsor, and can promote your products
• We get our own dedicated forum

Here are the banners I made:

We’re currently working with the site owner to set things up so we can have a few different variations of banners, and see what performs the best.

We decided to also use our sponsorship status to kick things off with a group buy discount on the grounding kit. All we required was 25 people to buy a kit, and we’d drop $10 (20%) off the price.

I’ll be posting an update later on and we’ll see how everything performed. We’ll find out if the sponsorship was worth the cost, and get a better idea of how best to utilize forum community marketing.

I made two changes to my blog, and I was surprised to notice that my CPC rates are now 5-10x what they were. What did I do? First I added AdSense section targeting, and second, I removed advertising from the page.

AdSense section targeting allows you to specifically exactly where Google should be scanning your page to deliver targeted ads. The entire reason AdSense is so effective is because the advertisements are meant to be targeted to the reader and the context that they have an interest about in the first place. The more targeted, the higher the click-through-rates, and more than likely more money to be made. Rather than just putting the standard AdSense code on your page, you can wrap you the content you want to either target or filter out using section targeting. If you want Google to target a specific area (for example the main content of your post), simply wrap it around this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

Write your content here

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you want to filter out specific sections of your page, you can wrap those in this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Write your content here

<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –>

The second thing I did was simply remove two of the three AdSense spots that I had on the site. I had a 468×60 on the top of the posts, a 160×600 on the sidebar, and a 468×60 on the bottom of the posts. I only kept the 468×60 on the top for now, and I noticed that the ads are much better, and my CPC rates have been averaging over $1 a click. Previously, I’d be lucky to get 25 cents. Taking other AdSense ads off of the page can make a huge difference in CPC rates because Google can only fulfill so many spots, and each one is worth less. This reason is why some people will limit Google advertising to limited spots and use other types of ads in other spots in order to maximize revenue. Of course, you should be doing some testing to see what works best for you.

Today, Google announced a new advertising format called Pay-per-action. I’ve always referred to this as CPA or cost-per-action.

What Is It?

This is going to be a major deal in online advertising from both the publisher and the advertiser perspective. Google advertising has always worked on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis where the advertiser would pay when a user clicks on their ad. With this new model, the advertiser will only pay when the user does a certain action, like filling out a form or buying something. In this new model, it does not matter how impressions or clicks are generated from the ad, as no payment is due until the action is completed. Some of the actions would be:

• Leads
• Signups
• Site interactions/pageviews
• Sales (always the same value)
• Sales (% of sale with many different sale values)

I have signed up to be a beta tester with my automotive site, ActiveTuning, as we currently use AdWords for part of our advertising budget. I haven’t decided how I’ll use it, but as of now I’m thinking that I will be looking for sales as well as leads/site interactions. I’ll use the leads for a scenario where a user will get as far as adding a product to their shopping cart, but may not necessarily go through the entire checkout process. It will definitely be a new world in terms of tweaking and playing around with different formats to see what works the best. Hopefully I am accepted as a beta tester.

Conversions would be tracked by using Google’s conversion tracking.

Making It Work

PPA works, and if optimized correctly can make much more money. An advertiser is willing to pay more for an action rather than a click because they can pre-formulate the ROI (return on investment). For example if I have a product that costs $100 and my cost is $60. I know I have up to $40 to play with before I start losing money on the product sale. Rather than pay $1/click where maybe the ratio of clicks-to-sale end up being $20 and 20 publishers essentially made $1…I’d be more willing to pay $10 to one publisher to generate that same one sale.

The problem is actually making it work. What I mean by that is making an ad that is just asking to be clicked so that as a publisher you can actually provide leads to advertisers that convert. The best way to do this is not by your regular banner ads, but by highly targeted in-content ads. For example if I write a review on a digital camera, a link in the review directly to a vendors product page that sells the camera will more than likely have a high sales conversion rate.

This is where Google’s new ad format called “text-link ads” comes in:

What is the text link format for pay-per-action ads?
Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to

Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we’ve found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

This new format will really help out in terms of making PPA successful for the advertiser, publisher, and ad network (Google in this case). It will be interested what other ad products come out of all of this.

Thanks to Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch, as his post made me aware of Google’s announcement.