I think a lot of my business comes from word of mouth, trying to be creative and holding different promotions and aligning with other business to cross promote. It does amaze me when I see the amount some businesses spend on ads 100,000L+, I have even seen over 250,000L. But I guess what that means is they are making tha much money to afford that kind of expense. I guess if I spent 25,000L on an ad and I saw an increase in over 25,000L a week in business, it was worth it.

I agree with what one person said, you have to work and plan to be successful. Its not easy, which is why a vast majority of businesses fail in sl. So many people think they can make a crap product, put it for sale and make a ton of money….I remember a year ago when I was naive like that.

If you get down to it the actual best sellers are events and word of mouth which are synonymous. I put together an event with DJs and had people go to busy, non-camper areas and hand out flyers and landmarks and ended up with about 20-30 people at my land consistently for 5 hours.

Once there I had a give-away contest for some specially made promotional items. I also gave everyone there a free robot avatar for showing up. I had scripted objects handle giving all that out so all I had to do was sit back, drink beers, chat with friends and watch the money come in! I rode a wave of publicity from that one event for about a month. “Hey where’d you get that?” carries you a lot farther than wasting $100.00 on an advertisement for a series of 1s and 0s.

I haven’t spent RL$ on SL in over a year and am able to finance my other fun projects (SL and otherwise) with ease. I could potentially live off of this if I tried harder but that would be pathetic and ignorant of me as I would like medical benefits and to have a resume that would be taken seriously.

Fuck what you heard, you have to actually WORK and PLAN if you want to have a successful business. It’s just as true in SL as it is in RL.

From: Vint Falken Why Second Life photographs are NOT screenshots Quote from the site – Being noticed, let alone blogged by NWN is always a huge honor – and traffic generator – so, before I forget: ‘Thank you, Mister Au!’ But I must admit, my 5 sec…

The fact is, it can be different for different people, however, and different sectors of the economy, and your sample is just too tiny to draw conclusions, except for you.

I can have that many teleports (27) in an hour in my system on various lots or even on one parcel, and I’ve been tracking these things for ages. In fact, I was getting ready to do it more scientifically and post the results when the classifieds began to get borked up. Now it is impossible to track, because if you change the location of your ad after one rental or product sells, or simply because you want to try something different, a new store location, whatever, the old teleports in the metric don’t dump out, and the new ones are added, giving false results unless you manually sort it.

Here is the distillation of what I have found:

1) $30 Search Ads work the best of anything there is. The new Search has mightily eroded that and forced people to contort themselves into pretzels to find the right words and positioning and there are annoyances like constantly having to recheck items to show in search if they are for sale, but there’s no question that $30 Search Ads work the best.

of course, there are a tiny, determined grouplet of geeks who keep telling you that they “don’t use search” and “search doesn’t work” and “traffic is gamed” and they go by “word of mouth” for their widgets. Ok. But we know better, because we make most of our sales from $30 search. Everyone in business in the sectors of land, rentals, clothing, vehicles, clubs, etc. SL knows that $30 work. A few FIC who have the cash to buy $100s of US dollars of classifieds believe that’s what works for their niche. That’s great, but that’s not what the majority have found out through experience over and over.

2) Classifieds do work, but you have to decide why you are spending more than $500 or for that matter $50 on them. A $50 classified can get you about as much as a $500 or even $5000 much of the time. In fact, you really have to ask why not have a $30 search instead of a $50 classified?! Except…you have to compete with others using classifieds.

Because the way the pages turn, not going to the second half of the first page, but the first half of the second page, a $500 ad is almost as good as a $5000. But there’s no question that buying the first 10 slots will get more TPs. It may not get more sales — or if it does, you’ll feel like you still didn’t make up the cost of the ad. But it gets you “market share” and eyeballs as they say and that’s part of the mix. Word of mouth can’t happen unless people flipping through ads see a logo and brand and think about it at some level in comparison shopping.

3) You have to steel yourself with a budget for advertising, and stick to it and monitor it. You begin to flail when you realize you’ve blown $10,000 on a classified, SL was down almost entirely on one of the days; somebody bought a flashier add for $10,001, the sim where your item is can’t seem to be brought up from constantly crashing by the Lindens — whatever. But if you say “I have $25 US budgeted for classifieds. I put them in every week. I check off the “repeat” button. And if I don’t get X teleports leading to Y sales I tweak it.”

4) There are other innovative ways to get advertising besides search/classifieds or camping or God forbid, ad-farms, which should be punishable by law. These include buying 512s and putting up little stores or displays inside an attractive home especially in new sims and continents as they come up as people won’t chance to see you on the older continents; renting mall space to put up displays; holding events; sponsoring live music or other types of activities in exchange for logo/notecard display, etc.

5) How can you deal with the problem of people who come to your store but don’t buy? Well, you can’t at one level, but you can also try things like polls asking them whether they were satisfied and then start to respond to concerns, i.e. if a lot of them clicked “too confusing” or “couldn’t find large enough parcel,” then you adjust your notecard explanations and your holdings, etc. etc.

I think because SL is so interactive and accelerated in the marketplace, you have a great opportunity to constantly adjust and try new things and check the results.

The Lindens need to fix the damn metrics on the classifieds and stop intruding with their own geeky understanding of how it should work.

Please come and vote for this on the JIRA:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3739

wonder how much your visitor index (and thereby sales) will increase after this free publicity?

cant be bad im sure lol

it does suggest this would be the most cost effective advertising form

To help people find your place make sure your land listing is informative, assuming you own the land you’re on (or have a thoughtful landlord) and keep it up-to-date, it’s the best L$30 per week u can spend.

Advertise in the classifieds the way people search in them – for specific items.