Some of you may know that I work for a local newspaper. We have a current promotion where local businesses can pay to have a photo and write up about their business in a special section called "Business Neighbors". For $50 a year, this profile and a link to their site will be on our newspaper web site.
Our web site is well spidered (meaning monitored closely by search engines) and since it’s been in existence for almost ten years, it’s a well established and highly ranked site. And we get around 20,000 to 30,000 page views on just our news stories every week.
"Why don’t you advertise your blog on Business Neighbors?" one of my co-workers asked. I guess I hesitated because I’m not really a business. Ideally, I would like to write a lot more than I do (and get paid to do it) and maybe this is one way to increase my freelancing locally. Worst case scenario is that I’ll get more locals reading my blog. Did I mention I get an employee discount on advertising?
So I’m pretty sure I’ll do this advertising because, as far as advertising goes, this is a deal. A few questions though from those of you more experiences in marketing then I am:
1. Should I be Nicole Ouellette, Breaking Even, or Breaking Even Freelance? I need to have a title of my business.
2. Should I spend profile space talking about the blog "personal finance from a local perspective" or about the freelance "Nicole launched this blog…. and is interested in freelance"? Would talking about both the personal finance blog and freelance writing in the same paragraph be confusing? I have 150-200 words to work with to give you an idea.
So if you have an opinion on this, even if it is that this is a dumb idea, I’d love to hear it. For those of you with your own web sites, have you tried advertising like this and found it successful? Thank you for your help!
Next time: Medical Bill Blues and How You Can Beat Them