Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Experimenting with Paid Advertising

I'm currently experimenting (meaning small amounts of $$$) with using the following paid advertising sites to direct traffic to www.mathtestnow.com:
  • Google AdWords.  Google is ubiquitous but, as this article explains, it also tends to be expensive.
  • BidVertiser.  I just put in a request with them today.  They offer a 20 dollar free credit (if you enter your paypal info), so I figure I have nothing to lose.  One thing I dislike about them - they offer a "Toolbar creator" - in my opinion those things are basically malware.
I haven't tried these yet, but I probably will:
  •  Outbrain.com: http://www.outbrain.com/ - it looks as though they focus on written content rather than webapps, so this may not be a good fit.
  • Virurl: https://virurl.com/ - it sounds like a decent concept, but my experience with it was very similar to this post, Is VirUrl Just a Haven For Click Fraud and Bots?  The cost-per-click is vastly less expensive than Google Adwords, but the quality of the clicks appears to somewhere between garbage and fraudulent.
Perhaps I should also try http://www.usertesting.com/, recommended by someone on quora.

Also, Google still hasn't crawled the site.  Given how much AJAX there is, I prbably need to read Google's article on how to make AJAX data crawlable and this stackoverflow explanation.

Finally, Udemy has a useful article on how to find beta testers.  In particular, I should try to find beta testers on the common core forums.