June 30th, 2010

Free Advertising! Now what…?

One of the things that frequently gets lost when you talk to marketers looking to do work online is the fact that traffic doesn’t just appear. If you launch something new, you have to find a way to let people know about it. Big companies that I’ve worked with learned that lesson fairly early by launching microsites that no one visited. Very quickly, new campaigns started including budget for attracting visitors.

At Fight we’ve been growing our following organically through Twitter and our blog, but we have also been keeping an eye out for opportunities to get in front of new people who haven’t yet ran into our online presence and might be interested in what we do.

So it was with no small amount of interest that I discovered that my copy of the June, 2010 Wired magazine arrived with a coupon for $75 worth of Google AdWords credit. Probably coincidentally, LinkedIn sent out a coupon on May 12th for $250 worth of advertising credit using their DirectAds product (LinkedIn’s Andrew Chang said that these offers have been going out since April to a subset of LinkedIn subscribers, so you may or may not have one sitting in your own inbox).

We love a good challenge, and this matched up well with an existing need, so we gave ourselves the task of putting these offers to good use in our favor. This is the first entry in a series of articles that we’ll do as we explore how to best take advantage of this very limited, but free, advertising opportunity.