Advertising in SL

Well its been over 15 days since the grand opening of Elegance Zyngo Hall and I have been learning alot as far as how to advertise my business. My methods seem to be working, my traffic ranking has increased to over 17,000 in this short time. A word to the squeemish, business in SL is very cutthroat, do not start a business and hope for it to succeed quickly without expecting to use what others may consider less than moral practices. When starting business with an already established product such as zyngo it can be very difficult to earn a profit. The only way to get a customer base is to basically steal customers from others. This train of thought will basically lead you to inovative ways of advertising that will inevitably make you lots of money.

The Direct Steal
Your first option for advertising is to actually goto a competitors busisness and actually ask their customers to come to your place. This is the equivalent of walking into Walmart and asking people to shop at Target while your there. You can probably get away with it for awhile but eventually your going to ask the wrong person and you will be banned from the land. I have had this happen to me this is a very unpleasant experience. I would not recommend using this method as it is the most immoral of all advertising practices and it really doesnt get you many customers. If you do decide to use this method actually talk to the people on a level of friendship prior to plugging your business and always be polite. Personally ive stopped doing this, I just dont like to do it.

The Advertising Board
You can get alot of customers from advertising with other businesses. Alot of businesses make money by offering advertising space on their land. I would suggest only using advertising boards that are on businesses that are similar to yours. Try to avoid advertising in camping areas that have enormous amounts of traffic, the advertising boards are ussually way overpriced and nobody clicks on them. I would probably estimate that 25% of my advertising budget is used in this way, I am too new to SL to tell you how much it effects my business but when I log on I can see how many people clicked on my ads and I can tell you it is probably worth it.

The Linden Way: Posting Classifieds
Posting a classified ad is probably one of the best things you can do to advertise your business in SL. Not only does it allow people who look at the classifieds to see your business but it also shows an advertismenet of your business whenever someone does a related search. My suggestion to how to choose the cost of your advertisement would be to always make sure that you are on the first page before you have to scroll and at least 4 up from that bottom spot. People hate turning the page and they also hate scrolling you definately dont want someone else outpricing you off that first page. I would also suggest NOT using any special characters and only capitalizing the first letter of each word. Everyone capitalizes their classified ads and to tell you the truth the ones that jump out at me are the ones that are diffrent not bigger.

Camping and Picks Camping
I hate Linden Labs for basically making this a requirement for a successful business. Your traffic rating number is not the amount of people who have visited your parcel. It is a calculation that involves the amount of time that people spend on your land and the amount of people who add your land to thier picks. The best way to increase this ranking and your exposure to others is to pay people to sit on your land and freeload. This causes alot of lag and costs alot of money. I would suggest L$2/ 15min for chair camping and L$25-L$50 for picks camping. I know it sucks but it absolutely has to be done if you want your ratings to increase. I have 16 chairs that pay L$2/15min and they are occupied 24hrs a day, for those that are not mathmatically inclined that is 92,160/month to maintain a halfway decent traffic rating to appear towards the top of the search results. Trust me though the boost in income offsets this cost.

Advertising With Groups
This is another practice that alot of other businesses will despise you for, but if done correctly you can do it without detection and bring in alot of new target customers. What I do is I join the groups of all of the other zyngo halls that are in SL, I click on the group info tab and it gives me a list of all of the members that are online in that group. I then click on each of their names and send them a landmark of my group through their profile. I get alot of people who decline the landmark but I also get a ton of people who show up and spend their hard earned money with me. I occasionally get a nasty message inreturn about spammng others I ussually just ignore it. If they knew how much I was making by spamming they would be doing it themselves.


Personally having used the methods above I woul have to say that running a business in SL is a full time job. If you cut corners and get lazy your traffic ranking will diminish and so will your income. Everything ive mentioned has worked well for me so far but keep in mind that I have only been doing business in SL for 15 days.