recently, I've been experimenting with the various forms of paid-for advertising offered by the PDF sales sites that CGS products are on. Normally, I'm one ot shy away from paid for advertising (years of shelling out big bucks for the stuff in the real world of marketing has made me very dubious about the value it offers). However, front page Mention of the Day (MOTD) advertising on RPGnow is cheap enough to make the experiment affordable.
The question I was really asking was: will I see a noticeable in increase in sales due to paying for front page MOTD, as opposed to only using the category (SF, horror, etc) based free MOTD hat you get as a Gold Vendor.
The answer to this is: no. There is not appreciable effect from getting front page MOTD. None at all.
2 months of paid for advertsing (at pretty minimal outlay, it must be admitted) yielded no difference in sales during the time the MOTD was running. There were click throughs, yes. However, sales remained absolutely static and did not even venture above the monthly average.
To my mind, if you are a Gold Vendor on RPGnow, use the free category MOTD feature. I don't think it helps much, but free advertising can't hurt in the long run. In addition, you're paying for that exposure through the 35% that RPGnow take from every sale. So take advantage of it. I would cousel against paying for further advertising, though.
Anyone else have experience of using RPGnow paid for MOTD and like to chip in? Or comments in general would be welcomed.
Cheers
Malcolm
My experiences are exactly
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Wed, 11/07/2007 - 10:52.
My experiences are exactly the same as yours! No noticeable benefit at all.
I also tried banners on ENWorld - again, absolutely no impact to sales.
So, any that do work?
Yeah, I can believe that. I
Submitted by Tim Gray on Wed, 11/07/2007 - 13:59.
Yeah, I can believe that.
I think you have to look at MOTD, banner ads, etc as building your *profile* rather than creating sales directly. Which means it's a game of more money than most small publishers can happily spare.
I've a feeling I've had *some* benefit from MOTD, which is why I keep buying it out of my earnings. The issue people have with it (even more so at DT) is that so many publishers use it that it's hard to get a decent presence. It comes up every so often in the e-pub forum.
When the site back ends merge, which should be in the next few weeks, they'll both be running the promotional points scheme that's currently at DriveThru. So you'll be able to get some of this sort of stuff without paying actual money.
Oh, and note that there's no such thing as Gold Vendors any more. That went away in the merger. If you find pages that still talk about it, it's because OBS can't be bothered to pay attention to detail on its site, in a similar way to the residual mention of Edge vs main site.
Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk