Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Adventures in Advertising--Project Wonderful

As part of the never-ending process of promoting SmuTopia, I recently began advertising through Project Wonderful. I learned about this ad service in the Etsy forums and have seen Project Wonderful ad spaces on many of the handmade blogs I read, so it seemed like a great way to get started while utilizing the experience and advice of my peers in the handmade community.

If you would like to either post your ads on others' blogs, or display ads from others on your blog, take a moment to visit Project Wonderful's home page. From there you can register for an account to create ads, then place bids for ad space on sites where you would like to advertise. Once you have registered and made a deposit (I started with $5 and most spaces I have bid on cost only a few pennies a day), you can also submit an application to host ad space on your site or blog (it will take a few days before you get a response, but the process is simple--no harder than adding any other button or gadget to your blog.)

One hint while creating your ads--they must be smaller than 100kb. I had to re size all of my ads because they were too big. I could have saved myself a step if I had checked the file size before trying to upload :) Once you have completed and activated your ad, you can search for ad space using the bid search engine on Project Wonderful. If you're looking to spend as little as possible I suggest changing the search options under the "bidding" section to show only ad spaces with a minimum bid of $0 to $0 with current bids from $0 to $0.50.

2 comments:

Almost Precious said...

Very enlightening. Sounds like you've researched this fairly well and can vouch from experience. Thanks for the insight...think I'll go check out Project Wonderful's home page.
Anna

Heidi said...

Thanks for this post! I've been wondering how all that worked, it's nice to hear about it from someone who has actually done it!