Discuss the fun task of marketing a t-shirt shop. Where to advertise, link building, word of mouth, press releases, search engine marketing, keyword advertising, magazines, etc.
it has been a while since i was active on thes forums. Now i hav my site up and running.
I was wandering...does anyone over here use google adwords?
There are a lot of t-shirt sites out there. Is it word paying for an adword that other sites already use?
I have used adwords in the past and they work but be careful because in an industry where there are so many tshops on line you may have to bid high to get seen. And limit your daily clicks around a healthy budget.. remember you pay for clicks.. even for looky Lou's (I hate that expression) that are 10 years old. I got 50 clicks from one kid in a matter of minutes.. And there is nothing you can do about it. I am also thinking about doing it again.. But see now there are 3 people that want to do this.. The one that bids the highest gets to the top. Lou
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Targeted ad words and specific phrases seem to work well. For instance, instead of paying a $5 for everytime the word t-shirt is clicked, try buying an ad word like "Country themed T-shirt" or "Glossy Picture Shirt". Every campaign might not get the impressions and volume of clicks that you would hope, but when someone clicks and you pay, it's extremely targeted and successful.
Josh nailed it right on. The more focused you make your keywords, the less you'll pay per keyword and the more targeted of potential buyer you'll find visiting your site (Which makes it more likely that you'll convert into a sale).
If your main focus is branding, then CPM ads might be a good choice. They don't show on Google searches, but they show on partner sites and in their adsense network. The good part about this is that you can pick and choose which sites you want to run your ads on. So if you have an urban themed apparel line, you can find a hip hop site running adsense ads and totally target your audience. I think CPM ads might work well there.
Targeted ads in any media are usually a good idea.
Thanks for the tips. The use of phrases as adword seems to be a good hint.
I just started out with my shop. It costed a penny so i don't want te spend to much money on advertising that doesn't work.
The first step I'm going to take is print flyers and nametags to hand them out at small gigs.
This might be the right kind of audience...i guess
Spent a lot w/ Adwords and Yahoo Marketing. It defiantly works… if you work it. It’s almost a FT job keeping up with the vast amounts of key words or content matches to make it fly at a cost-effective rate. Still can’t compare to “natural rankings”. Now with Google’s new search based on the users search history… it’s anyone’s guess.
Add to that… I just got an invitation to join the Google lawsuit. There’s a ton of Google Ad sites that can trick the system into thinking you got a valid hit… when in fact you did not. Everyone gets paid but the advertiser! We’ve all know it’s been going on for a while, but took it as “the price you have to pay” to play the game. The way I see it… Google owes me a few good weeks of solid traffic!
I don’t do Adwords in the tee shirt arena anymore, but it can defiantly drive some traffic if done correctly.
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I have been playing around with searching keywords for a week now. Amazing. Dizzying.
I see it is possible to pick many, many keywords.
Do you use a few, dozens?
Do you stick with the .5 keywords?
Do you advertise when someone searches a competitor?
Have banner ads worked better than the right-hand ads?
The google keywords picker doesn't show how many times a keyword was searched. Anybody have a good search engine for that?
As an aside, I keyed in some celebrity names and oh the raunchy searches.
Does anybody have a sense of what counts as a good clickthrough rate (clicks divided by page impressions) for AdWords or other forms of advertising? Mine seems low (less than 1/2 of one percent), but I don't really have any barometer for what would be reasonable.
Google Adwords 
