Friday, March 30, 2012
Cheap Mike Tours London, England!
Pay-per-click hasn’t been working that well lately for Cheap Mike. Since Mike always tries to do his best by the economy and spend money, he turned to look for a new advertising source. His good friend AN-G, the Vietnamese entrepreneur, suggested using Fiverr.com
For those of you not in the know, Fiverr.com is an online employment brokerage which dares people to offer jobs–called gigs– for five dollars. I say “dare” because some of the gigs are pretty ludicrous. I mean it takes guts to offer to write “I love you” on your upper and lower lip, magnify it 10 times and send it to somebody else’s significant other. Some of the gigs however–particularly the advertising gigs–seemed just right for a cheapo like Cheap Mike. The first advertising gig Cheap Mike fell for was a week of his logo touring London, England on the side of a white van.
How, you ask, did that London, England gig work for Cheap Mike? Well, it didn’t immediately bring in any money, if that’s your question. But then with advertising, sometimes only time will tell. It was fun to know Cheap Mike was getting a look at London even if I never will, and If Kate, the lovely Duchess of Cambridge, ever buys a domain from Cheap Mike it will have certainly been worth the five dollars!
The next gig Cheap Mike went for was a radio ad. The gentleman offering the 5$ gig would write up a professional ad using the information provided by the buyer. Cheap Mike sent him the info and got back a fine-looking ad. Unfortunately Cheap Mike has had even less training making radio announcements than he has writing ads–no problemo, the same gentleman, having worked in radio for years, offered to speak the ad as well for another 5 bucks. Another winner: I wish I could figure out how to add audio to this blog so the reader could be as impressed as I am.
Cheap Mike’s next mission was to find a radio station that would play the ad–again for 5 bucks. And again no problem; there were several online stations promising to do that for as long as a week or more. In fact, ClubCountryRadio out of OK city promised to do it for two weeks, five times a day. Oh, sure, it would have been great to put the ad on a regular local station, but the going price for that is $25 per announcement or $1750 for the same thing I got for $5.
How much business did this experiment bring me? I don’t know yet. But since the total cost came to less than $30 I got my money’s worth in education.
Michael Nardine
As should be made obvious by the accompanying photo, Mike Nardine (aka Cheap Mike) is plain vanilla and old as dirt. He is Secret Laboratory’s Technology Editor and has been writing since before the invention of the electric typewriter. His first computer was a 1kb Sinclair; his love-affair with computers began with a Kaypro. He has sold short stories to women’s magazines and has published several books, which are available in Amazon’s Kindle Store. Mr. Nardine has also written a whole slug of book reviews, play reviews, news articles, and consumer-tech stuff for various ezines and The Reader Weekly of Duluth, Minnesota. He presently lives in Rochester, Minnesota with his wife of many years and a fifteen-year-old Jack Russel Terrier named Chloe. Still writing as he circles the drain, he also sells domains and web hosting at CheapMikes.com. Visit Mike and view all of his titles at booksonkindle.com.
Email Mr. Nardine at michaelnardine@secretlaboratory.org.
