How much for advertising?

[sforn]

Just wondering, how much do people here spend on advertising each month?

[Steelsun]

Actual Physical Advertising each month: Less than $50
Website hosting costs (your site is an ad): Less than $50
Word of mouth from satisfied clients: Priceless

[Jeremy W.]

I put less than 50, but having said that we spent more than 500$ this month (bought a high traffic site, it will be a front-line advertising medium).

[mjames]

I've never spent a penny on advertising.

[aspen]

I've personally never spent money on advertising.

The business I work for/part own has however. We spend maybe $500-1000 a month at this point.

[WWWill]

we spend an average of around $1700 per month.

[icehousedesigns]

I'm with mjames, and aspen. I've spent 0. There are more than enough ways to market your business without paying one red cent.

[WWWill]

how much you spend would really depend on what you're marketing and how lofty your goals are. if you've got a business that only needs to support 1 or 2 people, then that business doesn't need to generate large amounts of revenue to accomplish that goal...therefore the ad budget wouldn't be very high. (paying to get listed in search engines is advertising, so is printing flyers, etc.)
If you've got 10-20 people to support, the dollar amounts that need to flow through the business are much higher...therefore the ad budget will be higher.

There's no set rules, but typically, an ad budget tends to be between 3-5% of gross revenue.

It's old and cliche, but half of all advertising works, it's figuring out which half! (if I could remember where to credit that quote I would)

[RKuhle]

Is this referring to advertising only, or any marketing costs? For example, advertising could be buying 100,000 banner impressions here at SitePoint. Marketing could be paying for your Yahoo! submission, paying someone (free-lance) to set up link trades, setting up an affiliate program (paying $0.10 per lead), buying business cards, etc.

Anyway, I don't really have a monthly rate. Although I have paid to have my logo on a regional racecar, paid Yahoo!, the free-lancer, affiliate programs and business cards. Total, around $600.

[Steelsun]

I actually consider my advertising costs to be: Biz cards, Web Site (it is a giant ad), flyers, etc.

Some also consider letterhead to be a form of advertisment, but try deducting that on your taxes, and the IRS will say no and claim it as an office consumable expense instead (which has a different rate).

[sforn]

hmm, looks like most people spend little on advertising. Thanks for the feed back, now I know how much I should spend

[Ambr0]

0$ per month and my site is one of the leaders in its category.

[moospot]

We spend a good $1000 on GoTo alone. Then we spend another $200-$300 in the other PPC engines. Then there's our AV and Inktomi submissions. We also list our site in directories and web portals, which usually have a monthly fee attached to them as well. Direct email campaigns run $2000/month.

I believe that our total last month was around $13000. Thats including LookSmart and Yahoo submissions for 4 sites, Inktomi and Altavista Submissions, Directory and portal listings, direct email and PPC engines.

On average, we spend around $4-5K per month

[VW]

It depends if you own a celeb or joke site you hardly need any advertising but if you
sell books or CDs you need to invest in advertising to pull in the traffic.

[freakysid]

Originally posted by sforn
hmm, looks like most people spend little on advertising. Thanks for the feed back, now I know how much I should spend

Whatever maximises your ROI - Return On Investment. Test things out on a small scale and work out the ROI to see if it was worth it. Then stick with those campaigns that yield the highest return. I don't know what your business is, but the return might be a sale or subscription or new client. I remember reading an article about this at www.promotionbase.com written by Matt quite some time ago.

[aspen]

We actually just started advertising on TV. I think we're paying $1800 a month for that.

[cbaker]

What product or service do you advertise on tv, is it effective, you dont happend to have a copy of the commercial sitting somwhere we can see??

[aspen]

Our webdesign business (See signature)

We just started doing it, the commercials are still in production, the second week of august they start airing.

We got 3 spots a day, morning news, afternoon news, and 5 oclock news I think. Plus they also mention our name during the news broadcast (Weather is brought to you by....)

And thats for I think $1800 a month, I don't remember the exact number.

Anyways hopefully it pays off.