One of those days
Quite a frustrating day today.
I have one particular site that I spend approx. £120,000 on each and every month to get very, very highly targeted traffic to, from the ppc search engines. It’s fair to say that this site generates lots of sales and is generally viewed as one of the top sites in the UK for this particular niche. Now, almost every day I receive advertising enquiries from companies, big and small asking how much it is to pay to be listed on the site. Based on the position of the ad I charge anywhere between £5k and £10k per month.
So basically an advertiser can pay £5k a month and sit on a page with no more than say 10 other advertisers and benefit from £120k worth of targeted paid-for traffic. Is it just me or is this a reasonable deal? It would seem not. 95% of people who email me either never reply or email me back to say I am too expensive. Where else are they going to get that volume of targeted traffic at that price? I always ask them to tell me where they think they can find a better deal, yet they never do.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my site is clearly an affiliate site and not a mega portal. As I know that some of the rates floating around for the portals etc make my £5k a month seem completely insignificant. Maybe time for a bit of a rebrand and new approach? I think so.
I mean one advertiser, in complete seriousness emailed me today asking how much advertising £50 would get him. *sigh*
And as an aside, has anybody ever tried to get a new American car insured in the UK? I’ve spent literally all of today trying to get a quote. Some people just won’t touch it even though it has a category 1 Thatcham immobiliser and alarm fitted, a RAC Trackstar device and will be kept in a locked garage! Eventually after 8 hours or so I ended up with 2 quotes from a total of about 35 insurance companies. One was for £3.5k, 1 was for £1.4k!
My best experience of the day was one insurance company who were absolutely adamant that they wouldn’t give me a quote unless I had shopped around first and gave them a quote that I had already received so they could try to beat it.
“Look, I don’t want to mess around ringing up loads of companies then ringing them all back with quotes. I JUST WANT SOME CAR INSURANCE, I HAVE MY CREDIT CARD HERE, LET ME SPEND SOME MONEY WITH YOUR COMPANY!!” I shouted.
“Sorry Sir it’s our policy not to give a quote without you giving us a competitors quote first”. I hung up in despair.
What I’m listening to right now: Maxwell - “Urban Hang Suite”
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
May 11th, 2005 at 11:55 pm
Why is it so hard to get insurance for an American car? I would also like to talk to you about Adwords since you seem to have extensive experience with it. Could you email me at jonnyq888-at-yahoo-dot-com? Thanks.
May 12th, 2005 at 10:38 am
It’s hard to get insurance for loads of reasons. The main one being that because the car is scarce in the UK and of quite a high value it will be a target for car thiefs.