Wise Startup Blog

Looking to begin your start-up marketing and run your first advertising campaign? You need to know where to start, and what to watch out for when spending your early dollars. Startup advertising can be very tricky, and if you’re not careful, you can blog the limited advertising budget you do have, being a startup.

Start up marketing and advertising is the make or break scenario for internet companies. You have a short window of time where your site explodes or your site flounders. If you’re successful, you can easily turn your startup advertising budget into a full-fledged sales operation.

The goal of any startup advertising plan is to 1) drive users and 2) drive sales. If your advertising isn’t doing either, you need to reevaluate.

When you’re first getting off the ground with your startup, cashflow is extremely limited and you need to maximize all of your resources, especially when it comes to advertising. Advertising can definitely be a one-way process where you are spending money, but not getting anything back.

A lot of advertising options simply build your brand, but don’t convert users well. And when you’re experimenting with advertising, this can be extremely frustrated and disheartening.

Where to Start Advertising Your Start Up

As you prepare for your first advertising campaign, your best source for referrals come from your own current traffic. Take a look, which I’m sure you do everyday, at your Google Analytics or stats reporting platform to see where your incoming traffic is coming from. If you’re like us, we get a LOT of traffic for Stumbleupon. If you don’t have any traffic now, do some searches on sites like Addictomatic to find where the conversation is taking place and put some money into those networks.

Advertising Is A Numbers Game

Armed with this information, we can simply throw money at the sources that are currently driving us traffic. You’re going to reach a saturation point at some time, but with the right tweaking, and budget constraints, you most likely won’t have the saturation problem very early on.

When building your campaign, you’re going to want to find the best mix of advertising platforms, luckily, I’ve been through almost all of them and will share with you that information in a followup post.

Do you have any advice for advertising for startups? Any techniques to help market your start up without breaking the bank or possibly for free? Share them with us in the comments and let’s build our startup community together.

Let us know your startup advertising techniques. What networks are working for you? What advertising networks are not working? Are you converting leads to sales?