advertising for free (and not-free) on permies.com

Aug 31, 2013 11:39:34

promote your books, websites, events, products on permies.com

I wish to make it clear that I like the idea of promoting lots of things in lots of ways here.

I like the idea of promoting:

web sites / blogs / youtube channels

products

workshops

convergences/conferences

PDCs

books

DVDS/videos

kickstarters

groups

seeds and starts

singles ads

real estate

and lots lots more

Some web sites (and especially forums) want to make it seem like there is nothing in the world except for that one site. I, on the other hand, like the idea that permies.com is packed with information about every other permaculture and homesteading site in the world. And I fully embrace the idea that this site is a community for a certain flavor of odd ducks, while there are a thousand other sites that serve other flavors of odd ducks. We are one community out of many. And we like knowing about all the others. I want permies to be the richest place to find out about workshops and PDCs all around the world.

Facebook and other social media sites are making it progressively more and more difficult to let your audience know about your stuff unless you fork out oodles of money. You could have thousands of followers on your page, and only 300 of them see your post unless you pay to boost it. Permies is not like that at all. In fact, I feel both free (and not-free) advertising efforts will go a lot farther here on permies than elsewhere.

First, be aware of all the free advertising you can do here at permies.com:

make a media rich thread about your organization/website/book/thing/whatever
- if you buy a piece of pie, you can add your thread to more forums
- every reply to your thread, bumps it to the top of our home page!
- reply to it every few days with new info or videos about your thing
- put our social media icon on your site and link it to your thread so it gets bumped more!
- in time, your thread could become "best" and appear permanently on a forum page

offering freebies to our pie people gets you listed to our heavily advertised pie program!

put a link to your stuff in your signature and write lots of excellent posts!

offer stuff in our book/dvd/event/pie promotions

get your stuff lined up for a review. Provide some of your stuff to our reviewers: book reviews or product reviews

give your stuff to some of our staff and hope that they talk about it a lot

check out our paid advertising stuff below and arrange a media trade. Banner-for-banner, or mailing-list mention for mailing-list mention, etc.

if we like your stuff, and you set it up in our digital market with a 40% affiliate fee, we might advertise the hell out of it.

some stuff in our digital market qualifies to be in our dailyish freebie list - which mysteriously seems to end up being sold

some stuff in our digital market qualifies to be in our future kickstarters - some of which we pay for

Oodles of details here.

How to avoid looking like a spammer:

Make one thread about your service/product/event. Make this thread look nice and professional using formatting tags, and post replies, updates, new pictures, etc to that thread. Multiple threads saying the same thing look spammy.

Add your one thread to multiple forums by using PIE &/or Thread Boost. This allows your thread to show up in multiple forums.

Make your thread a wiki. This allows you to edit whenever you like to add new pictures or update information. You can make a post a wiki through the "wiki" tab when you compose or edit your post. The "wiki" tab is next to the attachments tab where you add pictures.

Refrain from posting about your product/event/service on other people's threads unless it makes sense. If you make a lot of posts about your service on other people's threads, especially in a row, we will assume you are a spammer and your posts will be deleted. Add your link to your signature, and post only about your service/product/event when it is very relevant and helpful to the conversation.

The paid stuff:

We have been having massive success with thread boost. You create a thread for each product, or about your company, and then use a toolset to boost the thread. It is a technique that fits well with our users - and now they learn about your products and your business as it is comfortable to them.

banners at the top of the forums, plus get in on the big list which is linked to from every page
- a 75% discount on impressions for linking to your permies.com thread instead of your site

Buy Thread Boost on a thread you've made here on permies

sponsorship in the podcasts

a paragraph or so in the daily-ish email
- a 75% discount for linking to your permies.com thread instead of your site

a "tiny ad" in the daily-ish email
- a 75% discount for linking to your permies.com thread instead of your site

in-forum links
- a 75% discount for linking to your permies.com thread instead of your site

banners/offers throughout the content at richsoil.com

producer credits/mention in upcoming youtube videos

arrange to do a product giveaway or book giveaway and have a mention of your product/book at the top of the forums all week, and a mention in our weeklyish email (which goes out to over 63,000 people)

run your video at the top of our forums

we might be convinced to add a bumper sticker for you

adding magic love to your thread so it gets more attention

adding a mention of your product in wiki pages that can only be edited by staff

Do a lot of the free stuff for you

buy pie and give it out to folks that mention how great your stuff is

buy pie and give it out to folks that might like you and your stuff

Thread Boost

Thread Boost allows you to choose exactly how you want to promote your thread about your business/event. There's options for every price point. Here's just some of the options:

Similar Threads--have your thread show up on multiple related threads in their "similar threads" section

Auto-link--Select a word or phrase, and a ‘look-up’ will be done to find out how many threads contain that phrase

Add to more forums--Add your thread to one or more other related forums.

DX5 ads -- DX5 ads are the tiny ads that appear at the bottom of every thread. You can chose the wording of your ad, how often it shows up, where it shows up, and a lot more!

Tiny ads for emails--DX5 tiny ads in all of the emails that get sent out.

...and many more options!

Find out more here!

DX5 - Self Service In-Thread Ad Terminal

This service we're allows you to create your own simple ad, right down to the number of impressions. Simply enter the information into the online form, submit payment through Paypal, and your ad will immediately start running.

Here's what these ads usually look like:

They appear at the bottom of a thread, with a random line of what we call 'silly text'. The original version, DX1, was just that simple, however, DX5 has conversion rate optimization built into the software. As your add runs, the CTR is tracked alongside the text that is run with your ad. The text with the most effective CTR gets run the most, and the process continues to sharpen and fine tune itself.

To create one of these ads, click here.

If you have a web site and you would like to do some media trade, please contact gir at richsoil.com

If you are all ready to part with coin, please email paul at richsoil.com.

Thanks!

Jan 27, 2018 11:14:00

Are there any advertisers that would be willing to share some of the stats that they got from running an add on permies? Say number of clicks, associated sales, how long their add ran, etc. Having an example might help people who are not familiar with advertising understand why they might want to run an add here. Just a thought!

Jan 29, 2018 11:06:44

Daron Williams wrote:Are there any advertisers that would be willing to share some of the stats that they got from running an add on permies? Say number of clicks, associated sales, how long their add ran, etc. Having an example might help people who are not familiar with advertising understand why they might want to run an add here. Just a thought!

I think most of the advertisers, come and advertise, but don't participate in this community outside of their own threads.

Sep 17, 2018 11:32:52

I'll share my stats. This is what I've received so far. My ad was posted on August 29 and it's September 17th today.

#1172 DX5
Stats
Impressions: 22,725
Regular: 8,450 Mobile: 14,275
Clicks / CTR: 732 / 3.221%
Regular 536 / 6.3424% Mobile: 196 / 1.3729%
Unique: 98 Solo: 59

My ad(s) have been seen 22,725 times and clicked 59 times. This traffic matches up to what I'm seeing reported on my Etsy site. My ad runs in 5 states of the USA according to my settings.

According to an explanation that I have received in correspondence with Paul, which I'll likely botch in the paraphrasing, the "Regular" and "Mobile" numbers for Clicks/CTR can be disregarded, more or less. The "Unique" and "Solo" numbers represent something like an upper and lower end of the actual human clicks my ads have received. The discrepancy, per my understanding, is due to factors largely beyond the control of permies.com, and is attributed to scripts run by advertisers that appear to exist in order to inflate the number of clicks any site receives.

Solo = approximate "number of human people who have clicked the link".

Unique represents same group as Solo but allows for some counting of multiple clicks from one person on the same link.

Other advertisers should know that I have received substantive, helpful replies to the few concerns I've shared regarding my ad, which were mostly about my regional settings and stats.

Minor Points:
* I do notice that each time I have edited my ad, the ad no longer runs until approved by a staff member (which is acceptable practice). After a 3-4 day wait for someone to approve the change, however (including weekend) I do contact permies staff directly with the same request, after which my ad begins running again. My edited ad is currently in need of approval...! So maybe I won't edit an ad on Friday if I'm hoping to get clicks on same Friday, unless I hear differently.

* I just edited my ad to include the lower 48 states, and received an error after submitting the change. My changes didn't save properly.

Lastly, just for comparison, I'd like to mention that clicks on Google's various ad services cost around $0.60 per CLICK, and by comparison I feel I'm getting a better deal and a more targeted audience. Also, I don't know who all these other advertisers are, but I like permies.com and I personally have been hanging around. :)

Sep 26, 2018 08:11:10

Thanks for sharing your experience, Patrick!

Patrick Bales wrote:* I do notice that each time I have edited my ad, the ad no longer runs until approved by a staff member (which is acceptable practice). After a 3-4 day wait for someone to approve the change, however (including weekend) I do contact permies staff directly with the same request, after which my ad begins running again.

We just made a change to the forum software to make this easier for you and everyone who runs DX5 ads.
From now on, there is no waiting - you can edit your DX5 ads willy-nilly and your edits will happen immediately without a wait.

Sep 26, 2018 08:40:24

Google's various ad services cost around $0.60 per CLICK, and by comparison I feel I'm getting a better deal and a more targeted audience

I just wanna run the math a bit to see how we compare. We sell our stuff by the impression. So far you have had 22,725 impressions and 59 clicks. Our prices at the moment for direct DX5 are:

$50 for 50,000 impressions ($1 per thousand)
$100 for 150,000 ($0.67 per thousand)
$250 for 500,000 ($0.50 per thousand)
$500 for 1.5 million ($0.33 per thousand)
$1000 for 5 million ($0.20 per thousand)

So far, it seems like you are getting 2.6 clicks per thousand. So that would be $0.38 to $0.08 per click.

And for DX5 via thread boost, the prices are:

$0.10 for 1000 impressions ($0.10 per thousand)
$50 for 1 million ($0.05 per thousand)

So that would be $0.038 per click to $0.019 per click. And there is currently a 40% discount for orders over $1000, which would bring the price down to a penny per click! Of course, the user goes to a thread instead of directly to your site. But it does seem that if the user then goes to your site that the conversion would be much higher.

Sep 26, 2018 08:54:07

The clicks that we measure are the actual clicks that we record. For years this was perfectly accurate. And then about seven years ago the recorded clicks went up, but the number of people that actually arrived at the site stayed the same. It took us months to figure out what was going on.

We would record 1000 clicks. And the client would report getting 100 visits.

It turns out that there is some sort of twisted ..... program .... (app, computer, system, bot ....) out there that wants to show that some other site is getting traffic from a reputable site. And they want to push that information into google analytics. So they make a browser go to permies and click on an ad. And then trigger the ad counter stuff and do the redirect to the final destination - only the browser redirects to some other site instead. So we count the click, but the real advertiser doesn't get the traffic. The real advertiser gets the traffic for real users, but they don't get the traffic for fake users.

So we added to our algorithms.

1000 clicks
120 "unique" -- so the 1000 clicks came from 120 unique IP addresses.
100 "solo" -- about 20 IP addresses had a whole lot of clicks and 100 IP addresses had just one click.

Nov 05, 2020 07:16:49

I am thinking that surely there are a lot more things to add to these lists that are somehow slipping my mind at the moment. What have I forgotten to mention?

Jun 09, 2021 13:06:05

from email ...

1) Are ads still 75% off if linking to a thread it doesn't seem to factor into the calculation when setting up a DX5 ad with the form...

Set up the DX5 via thread boost to get that discount.

also no image upload fields, would I be contacted after an order so staff can review my ads?

Please tell me more about what you have in mind when you say "image upload fields".

2) Banners are 728x90 and squares are 150x150 correct?

Squares, yes. Banners ... I'll go along with that.

Is this the max since I couldn't find any information on this? (and paul told me earlier that animated .gifs work so that is good to know).

I am willing to talk about bigger stuff.

3) What is a more effective method thread boost/tiny ads & email or the banners & stuff. Any statistics on this?

I think DX5 is probably the most effective. And next would be similar threads. No exact numbers.

4) Any other statistics, I like to make data-driven decisions, and literally, any and all additional info helps a ton and I will put it to use.

I guess for the most part I kinda make do with what we have, and I haven't really run the numbers or done any a/b testing.

Aug 15, 2022 20:36:55

I want to bump this up with a mention that book and product weeks are a great way to get your product out there and gain some goodwill from the community.

The community here is awesome but responds well to honest, straightforward, this is what I'm selling approach. We all know that interacting with this world takes some sort of money, and don't begrudge people for earning a living.

Aug 31, 2022 08:55:23

Just a reminder:

I wish to make it clear that I like the idea of promoting lots of things in lots of ways here.

Dec 28, 2022 13:42:51

Reminder, it's okay to promote your stuff, so long as it is done respectfully. Otherwise, it could get caught in the spam filter. The first post in thread has some tips on how to do.

And here's more ways to promote your stuff https://permies.com/advertising/

Sep 09, 2023 15:29:58

I use permies a lot to promote my own stuff. I'm often running experiments to see what things I do give the best results (most links and quality of links - these are not the same thing) for the least time.

Paul says:

Refrain from posting about your product/event/service on other people's threads unless it makes sense.

I see this in reddit and other online moshpits. I see the hate people heap on it when it happens.

It's very easy to want to do this. Their project is the same topic as my thing to promote. But do it wrong, and it creates negative associations to the project. Sometimes it can even earn Googlehate towards the thing we link to.

It's a much better return of energy to promote to a thread that doesn't have the personal investment.

People are very protective of journal or project threads. Not just the writer, but the readers. Their primary reason for reading those threads is the personal connection they feel towards the OP. So they are going to be hostile if they see promotional material in that thread which isn't about the OP.

To successfully promote in these project/journal threads, extra time needs to be taken. The item we are promoting needs to answer a specific question already asked in the thread or the person doing the promoting needs to take the time to relate the item to the existing conversation.

When done well, it can earn some high-quality clicks (but not a large volume). But it takes an extra half an hour and it's often not the best return on the investment.

Nov 27, 2023 14:21:19

There are some good tips here for promoting stuff in general, not just on permies.

Jun 17, 2024 13:21:25

Respectful self promotion is allowed.

However, it's a big help if it doesn't look like spam. Our readership doesn't respond well to spammy promotions.

What they do respond well to is taking the time to be part of the community and sharing this cool thing you sell.

Jan 11, 2025 05:07:37

This may be a bit of a secret, but if you have read this far into this thread, you are probably serious about sharing your cool stuff.

If you want people to click on your stuff, avoid link shorteners like bit.ly.

There is no character limit, so no need for them. What's more, so many spammers and people with ill intent use these, that there is massive distrust in shortened links now. Even if sites allow them, or the browser, most people won't click.

Mar 23, 2025 19:52:13

I think a big part of advertising on permies is that your post doesn't look like spam. We want permies to be a place where people can promote their permaculture efforts. But, if something is spammy, it'll likely get deleted.

Things that look spammy:

Making multiple threads about the same thing.

Making multiple posts about the same thing on other people's thread

Advertising things that are toxic or against our publishing standards

Not knowing our forum well enough to post your stuff in the right place. If you make a post in the Digital Market, it should be a Digital Market style thread (here's a tutorial for that).

If you don't know where to post your advertising without it being considered spam and potentially deleted, post it in Blatant Advertising