TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

I have been trying something new for getting the word out regarding TeamworkPM lately. We have tried a number of advertising systems before, including google ads but
we didn't really find them that effective. We did pull users into the site but the conversion rate wasn't great plus we had no idea what sites the ads were showing on so
it was hard to target sites that worked well. Plus Google adwords isn't the most straight forward system to use either so we gave it a rest. A while ago I signed up to buysellads.com but
never did anything else with it, then I heard an interview with founder, Todd Garland on www.mixergy.com (one of my new favorite sites)
It was a great interview with the man behind the site and got me thinking again about Buysellads.com, so I decided to go back to the website and take another look at what they had to offer there.

Once I logged in I decided to put $800 into my account to give the system a good testing. I went through the list of websites that they have signed up, I then picked a few sites to begin advertising on. The ones I decided to go with were:
www.macstories.net/
www.1stwebdesigner.com/
www.iconfinder.com/
www.erictric.com/

I decided on these because they spanned a cross section of users and also they had different styles of adverts so I could get a better idea of what type of websites and advert will work for us.
I have to say the interface with BuySellads is savage, everything is simple right from signing up to creating ad spots to uploading ads. It's just a really easy site to use.

One of the great features this site has is the A/B testing you can do with adverts, this lets you place a number of adverts in the same spot on a site so you can work out what ad version works the best and sends more people through.
through to your website. This feature is so unbelievably easy to setup as well. Just upload a few adverts and thats it. Now you just have to watch the stats.
After a while you can easily pause the advert that doesn't seem to be working out.

The screen shot is from one of the websites I placed an ad with, you can see the conversion rate for the different ad variation.
The middle one was not performing as well as the first one so I paused it. I then looked at a few other ads out there, went back to the drawing board and designed a new one, uploaded it, and we are letting the 2 battle it out for the top spot.

We are only about a week into the campaign so it's hard to tell yet how many users that come through from the adverts will convert into paid users but then again with all advertising
it's never as straight forward as that, we won't be able to know what user saw the advert and then typed "TeamworkPM" into google or some other search engine to find us. The real measures will be in increased site traffic, and the only one the really matters at the the end of month which is increased signups, if we keep up the growth that we been having lately then we will be really happy.

If your looking to try a bit of advertising yourself I think Buysellads.com is a great service and I would say give it a lash, the one thing I would love to see is more areas of interest other than just design and tech based websites within their network. I think it's a super service for both the publishers and the advertisers. For the advertisers it's a great way to advertise and get your message out there as it's very easy to budget your spends as you are dealing with flat monthly amounts and most importantly it's simple to use.