If you are looking for leads, as opposed to simple brand awareness, my advice would be to ensure that your product is expensive enough to make it worthwhile.

We looked into StackOverflow advertisement for http://ThinkCode.TV, but we gave up on it due to our low pricing.

For example, our MacRuby screencast costs $8.99, of which $4.05 is actual profit for the company. Buying 100,000 impressions for the macruby tag costs $1000 (their minimum). With a typical click-through rate of 0.20%, we would receive about 200 clicks. We wouldn't break even, even if all 200 clicks converted (which is a ridiculous assumption).

For brand awareness or high ticket items, it may be worth it though.

Wow. I'm into screencasts, but I'd never heard of you! I'm curious about the pre-order screencasts. How much planning did you do beforehand? Are lesson plans subject to change? Are you set up to do bulk refunds if you don't finish a series in a reasonable amount of time?

I think it's a good idea, perhaps taken a little too far. I'd probably want to finish half of a series before taking money for a whole series.

> Wow. I'm into screencasts, but I'd never heard of you!

We launched a month ago. :)

> I'm curious about the pre-order screencasts. How much planning did you do beforehand?

There is quite a bit of planning behind it:

* Only authors that we're familiar with and trust can do courses (as opposed to authoring a single screencast).

* Each author needs to be specific about what material they're going to cover in each lesson.

* Half of the royalties from preorders are withheld until the course is completed. This motivates authors to finish what they started, as well as giving us funds to handle emergency situations.

* We only release a course after work on the second lesson has been started. This helps us evaluate how long the first lesson took a given author. If it took too long, we won't start a course, but simply convert that lesson into a single screencast.

* We aim for a release of at least one lesson per month, give or take.

* When it comes to TDD and Python, these courses have been adopted/translated from our Italian catalog, where the fourth and fifth lessons, respectively, are being created at the moment. The Italian version of the Python course should be finished by the end of June, then it will be a matter of translation.

> Are you set up to do bulk refunds if you don't finish a series in a reasonable amount of time?

Creating a whole course takes a lot of time and work. It's akin to writing a large technical book. For this reason, we may disagree on the definition of "reasonable amount of time". What's sure is that if after a year, a course has yet to be completed, and a customer complains, we'll issue a partial refund or some form of "store credit".

Ultimately, we sincerely care about providing really good customer care, and strive to ensure that all of our courses end up being completed.

I'm confused? CTR of 20%? So 20% of 100,000 is 20,000 last I checked. Of 20,000 hits, converting even 2% into purchases (should be realistic) is 400 purchases. If I did my math right, thats $620 profit. Not big bucks, but still profit.

CTR is 0.2% not 20%

Suddenly, things make sense. My bad. :)

I tried to purchase a screencast using PayPal but I still need to enter full name, phone number, email address, and full address at the FastSpring site as well. Is there a way to avoid entering all that personal data over there?

Sure, shoot me an email at support@thinkcode.tv and we can fulfill the order manually.

I have tried advertising on FusionAds. Here is my limited assessment.

First of all, this is what the campaign traffic looked like for the duration of the campaign. I did a one week "burst" campaign and did not run any other (significant) campaigns during this period:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4070/4619944957_84f99f0aff_o....

I rotated 3 ads on Fusion Ads, all for the same product with slightly different offers / message.

The Good:

The network that you get exposed to is high quality. I think because of that I had some residual indirect effects such as high profile bloggers suddenly mentioning my app or writing about it in the weeks following the campaign. Might not have been able to achieve this otherwise.

CTR seemed to be in line with expectations.

The Bad:

The tech crowd is a hard sell. There were 3 sales generated from this campaign, which is quite bad considering the ad budget. I don't think the audience was quite right for my product, at least to expect direct conversions.

That said, perhaps it was my message / ad design. To be honest with you, banner ads have not been an effective way to generate sales for me in general. Testimonials and blog posts converted much higher.

Conclusion:

YMMV, but I would use FusionAds again for market awareness. To launch a new product or launch a product update. It exposes you to a crowd of bloggers and influencers who would otherwise be hard to reach (in one shot like this). And I would hope for indirect effects from that, much like hiring a PR firm to contact press / bloggers on my behalf. I wouldn't expect direct sales from the banner, but again, that's just been my experience.

EDIT: got my terminology wrong - I didn't run a "roadblock", I ran a "burst" campaign :)

Well, I can give a few thoughts from the other side of this fence. At Fusion, we do our part to get our promotions in front of the right eyeballs. As well, by now the value of our brand can lend some credence to our customers.

Unfortunately, we sometimes get a client who thinks that just by getting some exposure on a network like ours or in an app like Tweetie, sales will sky rocket. But for that to happen, some thought and hard work also have to go into the promotion.

We can help an advertiser get the traffic, but if the product/service is low quality, conversions will be low. We do our best to filter out the bad and only promote the good stuff, products we believe in or use ourselves, but reality is that the occasional lemon gets in the door.

Advertising with Fusion will help with your brand awareness, but because so many of our customers our smaller one/two man shops — which we love — we care about conversions as well. And so we try to help each customer get the best ROI by encouraging attractive graphics and smart copy.

In case you haven't seen it, David Greiner from Campaign Monitor wrote a fantastic, in-depth blog post about his team's success (or otherwise) with FusionAds, the Deck and others:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2779/promoting-with...

I had a very similar experience to what fookyong had with FusionAds. We were running 2 parallel one-week "blasts" for our MacGraPhoto (http://www.macgraphoto.com) bundle of graphical Mac software exactly 6 months ago.

FusionAds seemed to be very fit for this because of their focus on design and graphic professionals. It was also the biggest one source of advertising for us.

The process and their support were very good. Unfortunately we've had extremely little return from the ads. At least in terms of direct sales. I think the gross income didn't cover 10% of the budget of ads and after split of the revenue it's negligible.

I don't know if it had any effect in raising awareness or interest from bloggers/news agencies as its hard to measure and we also did a press-release and advertised and were reviewed on other sites.

So for this campaign of us it turned out to be quite non-helpful. We lost money with it. Of course this doesn't have to happen to you if you have a different product or market.

Coincidentally, today is exactly the date where the PayPal money from my campaign should have been unfreezed if not for my blog post 6 months ago, which was #1 on HN back then. Thanks guys. I think your support helped to make PayPal their move and unfreeze the money on short notice.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000829

I've done Daring Fireball several times for The Little App Factory (tlaf.com). While the immediate response is fairly good, I believe the real payoff is more long term. Publishers and the hardcore mac community notices what's advertised there and may be more inclined to write-up your product or service.

Note that you can bootstrap your way into this sort of effect by figuring out what your influencer of choice (blogger, NYT journalist, whatever) is likely to be searching for and then putting AdWords against it. Since they're often a bit smarter than the average bear and using longtail or obviously non-commercial queries, these are generally cheap as sin.

Then, rather than a landing page for a commercial service, you direct them to a page designed to elicit coverage of whatever it is that you're offering.

An example that I don't know that any SEO did so they won't be POed if I mention it: you know all the Facebook privacy hubub right now? I think it is quite likely that someone is out there looking for [facebook privacy quote]. If you're going to spend thousands on PR, why not spend a few tens on AdWords and have something responsive to that. It is very, very cheap if your page influences coverage at the NYT or pulls in links from bloggers.

Don't forget these are adword results and not organic. If I were researching a piece, I likelynwould steer away from "inorganic" results.

You are demonstrably savvier than some employees at the Grey Lady whose names you would almost certainly recognize.

I too would really like to know. I've been looking into advertising with Fusion, as I'm so far a very small one-man shop, but the network idea sounds very intriguing.

What about influAds? http://influads.com

They seem to be quite new but gathering an interesting batch of members. Small when compared to the scale of the others.

Anyone tried?

I'm also curious to see whether these 'community' concepts actually deliver results or are just well dressed display ads.