I’ve written about Web Auctions Daily, my auction aggregator aimed at Internet marketers, before but it’s time to mention it again after a recent refresh the site was given.

I’m calling it Web Auctions Daily 1.5. The general idea of the site has stayed the same but now there are additional sources for more web site, domain and template listings. I’ve also included Facebook Application auctions to the site as well, for those of you looking to get into that game. I’ve tightened up the look a bit to hopefully make it easier to navigate and find what you want.

The search feature is brutally basic so when I find time I’ll be working on that a bit. That’ll be the main improvement for version 2.0 I think.

A Promised Look Back

I literally put the original version of Web Auctions Daily together in about three hours on December 1st of last year. I wrote a post about it afterwards and promised to follow up later on detailing my methods of promoting it. This site isn’t a money making venture for me as much as it was a technical/educational exercise so my marketing strategy was just to get eyeballs and not necessarily turn a profit. As it stands today, there are no means of generating revenue on the site.

With that in mind… my marketing efforts were a complete disaster. I’ll be honest with you when I say I’m not really good at driving traffic because I’m generally too lazy to do all of the grunt work that is required. All of my side projects rely on automation to run and generate income regardless of large traffic volume.

As a web developer, my job is to build a site and then hand it off to its new owner. I’m not used to or very experienced in post-launch promotion. I didn’t have a lot of time to go around building up backlinks and whatnot so I made the classic mistake of trying to take the easy way out with marketing.

With that in mind, here’s what I did to advertise my auction aggregator…

My Failed Advertising Methods

I did try a few of the regular, link building means to start with. Right out of the gate I made an announcement post at Digital Point that promptly fell on deaf ears. The thread is exactly 60 days old as of today and it has 0 replies and only 83 views. Needless to say I haven’t seen a lot of referral traffic from Digital Point.

At this point I was back knee-deep into a freelance programming gig so my time was extremely limited. I decided I would try and advertise with some small banner ads on a few blogs. This proved to be a waste of dollars.

I chose three blogs that were either entirely focused on making money online or mentioned it frequently. They all had reasonably sized audiences. I’ll not reveal the names of the blogs I advertised on but my CPC averaged out to be about $0.67 between all three of them over the course of a month. I don’t think that’s very good. I also advertised on an RSS feed related to domaining. This was the cheapest method I tried and it also didn’t lead to much traffic.

Wrap This Up

I’m droning on here a bit so I’ll sum it all up for you. I took the easy way out and it cost me a bit of pocket money but I learned a lot. It was definitely worth the money. I’m going to try one more advertising method in the upcoming weeks that I think might be a bit better but we’ll see.

The bottom line is that Web Auctions Daily was built for my own personal use and I just happen to think other people might find it as useful and interesting as I do. I’m not really hell bent on making the site popular but I certainly learned a lot trying to move things along. The lesson, as always, is to not be lazy and get out there and do the dirty work to generate backlinks and traffic to your site.

If anyone has any personal experience with banner advertising (and managed to stick around and read this far) let me know about it in the comments.