When I decided to launch Jack’s Newsletter last week I thought I would give the banner advertising system called Project Wonderful a try.

Project Wonderful is, in short, an advertising platform for advertisers and publishers based on an auction system. The system is slightly complex so I suggest that, if you’re interested, you head on over to their explanation page and learn more. Basically you bid on a spot for a set amount of money and as long as you aren’t outbid by another advertiser your banner remains displayed until you either run out of money or a certain time limit you define has been met.

I first came across Project Wonderful on the Entrecard blog and I initially only planned to bid on one of their six banner spots. Of course, once I got registered my account, deposited some funds via PayPal and got into using the system I decided to expand my advertising a bit.

I chose the Entrecard site and also a handful of blogs that had the term “wordpress” tagged as one of their topics. The banner I used is on the right and it led directly to the signup page for Jack’s Newsletter.

I’m going to now give you exact details on what I spent, the views my banner received and the clicks that came through. In an effort to keep the sites I used private I’ll only be describing their topic/niche and not reveal the actual name of the site (except for Entrecard, who are fair game in my eyes).

As you can see from my table, the cost per click was pretty good. I received targeted traffic for prices similar or even lower than what I would have gotten through a more traditional advertising platform such as AdWords.

As far as actual conversions on the traffic… well, my hunch is that the only really good converter was the Entrecard banner. I didn’t have any really good means of tracking this in place because I kind of jumped right into using Project Wonderful without a lot of preparation.

Bottom Line

I think I’m going to be using Project Wonderful again in the very near future. I’ll definitely give it one more run promoting the newsletter before the premium WordPress theme giveaway is over.

Another neat twist to using this system that I hadn’t initially planned on is the spying factor involved. You can obviously quite easily get an idea of the kind of traffic sites are getting by just looking at your banner stats. I wonder how many publishers stop to think how much information about their traffic they’re giving away by being a member of Project Wonderful.

Project Wonderful has a slightly intimidating concept and a rather difficult interface but if you’re willing to take the time and chance a few dollars on it you might see some pretty nice results. It’s officially recommended.