Paying for advertising on WordPress, an experiment

 What's up everybody. Welcome to the episode of the PW podcast. In this one, I'm going to talk about paying for advertising. Now I'm doing a little bit of an experiment here and you folks who've been listening for a while. You know, I'd like to try different things and see how they're going to work out for me. So what happened was I was working in the administration side of my website.

One of my websites works with WordPress. And I use Jetpack. And in there I noticed there was, there was this thing in there to advertise on wordpress.com, very popular website and some WordPress sites. And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking about it. And I thought, yeah, why not? So, what you do is you can select your, one of your posts or however many posts you want. But it's basically you select a post and then you say, look, I want to spend this amount of money over this amount of days. And it'll give you an approximation of, well, we think it'll be, displayed this many times to this many users. And I'm looking at this and I forget the exact numbers, but I think it was like, Maybe a couple of hundred thousand exposures, something like that for $35. For seven days. And I thought, okay. You know what you never know until you try these things. And I've been experimenting with Fiverr recently, as you know, on some other things.

So I thought let's give this a go because I'm not getting any growth of any great value on my. Website. And I thought I got to do something and, you know, first to admit that I'm not great at marketing. Partly because of my own ignorance of not wanting to spend a lot of time learning yet. But also because I don't have a lot of time to do it in reality.

I have no time to do it. I have a day job, and the more time you spend doing one thing, the less time you spend doing another and so on and so on. So I thought, okay, you know what, sometimes you got to do go die, right? So I've set it up for one of my posts this week. I'll put a link in the show notes as to which post it is. But it's basically a podcast episode that I did about developer mental health and dealing with that. And burnout and all of those kinds of things.

And I thought, okay, this actually feels like a double win. If this works number one, I'll get potentially exposure to visitors on the website. And number two exposure to the Compile Swift podcast where this episode is. So it has the potential to be a double win. And then for the third bonus, I'll get some insight as to whether this is worth it or not. Now first to say that, I don't sell anything because such other than an app in the app store and a course that I am still working on.

Yeah. More about that in the future, but. I'm not. Spending money to make money here. I'm spending money to try and spread. Awareness of what I'm doing, which is still value well spent, in my opinion. But also to do this experiment and say, okay, prove that this is worth doing. And the reason that I chose this particular one with Jetpack and advertising on WordPress sites.

I'll explain why, because I'm sure some of you are saying. Well, why didn't you do Instagram, Facebook, or the usual ones? Right? Well, okay. I have done Facebook before. It sort of worked. Definitely no question there. But the reason I chose to advertise on these on WordPress sites is not only WordPress is a lot of the web. But also because. It feels like it's a better match for my target audience.

And that's a big thing you have to think about because my target audience for this. Podcast episode that I'm advertising in the blog post to go with it. Is developers. And people who make stuff right. They tend to use WordPress or some kind of blogging mechanism. To do that developers, of course, you know, we love to share what we learn and that means blog posts and those kinds of things, right?

Not quick 15 second videos or some throwaway thing, is it. For want of a better phrase. So I thought, okay, well then WordPress, blogging's you know, system feels like the most appropriate. For my audience. Maybe I'm wrong again, this test is going to prove this. So that's what I'm doing.

It's due, hopefully it's in review at the moment. Theoretically meant to start tomorrow for seven days, March the first of the seventh. We'll see. And of course I will let you know how it goes. I'm fascinated to see how this works. Arguably, do I have $35 to spend on it at the moment? Well, maybe not, but I'm going to try it and it's pretty cheap.

Right. So if you put it in context, it's not many coffees, I'll let you know how it goes. So, you know, stay tuned on this podcast to find out. And at Peter Witham dot com. But I wanted to put this out there and share it with you all so that some of you who may be thinking about doing something similar or wondering what to do. Maybe you can learn from my tests here.

Right? I'm going to save you the $35 or maybe convince you to spend it. I don't know which one we'll see. I don't make any money from it either way, so, you know, Hey, take it for what it's worth. With that folks. I'm going to leave it there, but I wanted to catch up and share that with you.

I will speak to you in the next episode.