You know you come across many mareting ingrediants online and everyone tells you do this and do that, so what is your best tip for anyone doing online marketing? mine is be patient...I think this is really important because everyone seems to be advertising you will make instant money, money in 24 hours but it aint true, in the end its all marketing, so you gotta be patient for those results to come. Rome wasnt built in a day
You have to be consistant. Stick to your marketing campaigns and don't give up if you don't see the results you expected right away. Learn from your results and improve on them for your next campaign.
It's like player Texas Hold'em, if you have a massive stack of chips, it's a lot easier. So... Get a big budget. Don't fiddle about.
I agree with Tops30. But keep in mind that your money can be spent foolishly if you are not careful. Just because you have an unlimited source of funds doesn't mean you should spend it all on a one shot marketing campaign. I still believe it is better to not put all your eggs into one basket. The same holds true for a marketing campaign. I have seen many a poker game where the chip leader goes all in only to loose.
DO SOMETHING! AND KEEP DOING IT FOR A WHILE! It's easy to get caught up in reading 87 different marketing books, blogs, and forums looking for the perfect marketing idea and NEVER doing something because you are waiting for the PERFECT marketing idea. I threw together the "scam a friend" idea for my debtscams.com site, as an attempt at a viral marketing plan. I had a good amount of initial visitors (mostly from this forum) but it turned out my idea wasn't as viral as I'd thought. HOWEVER, at least I TRIED it. I did get SOME visitors because of it.
Find the people that are most likely to adopt your product, even if they are a smaller segment and target them. After getting them to love it, you can move on to the bigger fish. Plus you will have evangilists (and cash from the smaller segment) to move on to the rest of the market.
I don't agree that a large budget is a 'tip' for success, I've seen lots of large budgets get blown with very little return at all. Be smart with your budget and you'll get further. I worked with a site selling Halloween costumes last fall and was able to turn a $150 advertising budget into a little over $10,000 in gross sales (with a 20% commission for me). Think about who and what you're targeting with your ads. Cross-merchandise promotions are great. The site I was working with specialized in costumes for women, I got them ad spots on a few competitors' sites who catered more to costumes and clothing for men. When you can find a popular site that provides a related but peripheral product or service to what you're offering you've struck gold. Think just like retail stores do, when a store has dog food on sale they put the display near the pet supplies aisle, not over by the bed and bath section. That way while you're grabbing the dog food you came in for you might be tempted to toss a chew-toy or new leash into your cart. The same mentality in online advertising works too and I'm always surprised at how little I see of it.
Then let me add the obvious next tip: Don't blow it all... Point is, with a small budget you have to pick and run small campaigns. Online marketing is all about gathering feedback. Small campaigns are often too small to generate useful feedback. You need serious numbers for statistics to become significant. I've seen plenty of people stop their AdWords campaign after the initial $100 didn't yield what they wanted. At the same time, from experience I know $100 isn't nearly enough 'time' to find out which keywords work best, which landing pages work best etc. You need time, and to fill time you need money. You have to speculate to accumulate... No one ever got rich because they took extreme care. Take calculated risk. Spending $50 here, $35 there and $100 there doesn't tell you nearly enough. If you don't have the budget, you'll have to get VERY creative, let other people spend... Affiliate marketing then is often best because you only pay for results.
Not always, for some people a campaign is about increasing sales or brand awareness. I think we're just looking at it from different perspectives. I'd agree with you completely if the question was what's your best AdWords/PPC advice. Because you're absolutely correct that PPC marketing requires large volumes of data to get any sort of accurate assessments from. Still, if someone is looking to improve their sales volume, conversion rates or brand awareness then small and less expensive moves can be the better approach.
Market a product/service/site that you are knowledgeable about or have a personal interest in. It will be all that much easier for you to get inside a surfers head and sell to them.
Number of sales, sign-ups, brand penetrations, that IS feedback. Something you can measure. There is so much you need to record before you can say "Hey, this campaign (PPC, offline print, affiliate, promo, etc.) works consistently well!". You need impressions, CTR, conversions, margin, time from first visit to purchase, number of enquiries etc. etc. If you just blow $100 on AdWords for example and then stop it, you didn't allow time for repeat visitors to be converted etc. So you dismiss the campaign based on too few sales. Say you only got one sale. And you assume that spending another $100 will result in another 1 sale. Not necessarily true! Most campaigns start slowly so you might well find that around the 3-500 mark you start getting 5-10 sales per $100 spent etc. Could be because of the 'buzz', seasonality, allowing visitors time to research the deal, etc. etc. That's my point.
Tops30, I'm not arguing with you here. I think you're absolutely on the money with what you're saying, I just think it applies more specifically to PPC marketing than to marketing in general. You can get the same sort of data--feedback--with ads strategically placed on related web sites that get high traffic too, and a large budget isn't always required for this. That was my point. It's a tried and true practice. Every retail store you've ever been in does it, because it works. Cross-merchandising is simply taking advantage of the fact that it's easier to sell someone something if their mind is already on the general topic. It's the same theory behind AdWords, you're paying to get already targeted traffic. When you advertise a related item on another's web site you're doing the same thing. You still have to be selective, but it isn't really hard work. For example, I wouldn't waste my time or money advertising camping gear on a site where someone's blogging about their camping advertures. Even though it's related the majority of visitors are in reading mode, not buying. However, if I found a site that strictly sells little camping stoves then I'd approach it to advertise my tents and backpacks on. This site's visitors are in buying mode already and looking for camping gear.
Yeah, as always, 'it depends' - but still, the more data you can collect, the easier future decisions are. Anyway, I like seeing members actually write some decent sized posts. You're getting a bunch of green for that.
My best marketing tip is... Keep your best marketing tips to yourself! In all seriousness, I would have to say focus on driving targeted traffic (not PR, SEO and whatever else) and converting that traffic into sales or at the very least capture a lead.
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