I decided recently that I want to become much more focused with my marketing. I'd definitely rather specialize and be excellent in one thing, than be mediocre at a few things. I've cut back all of my marketing activities, to focus soley on one simple business model. This involves giving away my absolute best online marketing strategy information for free. I decided that if I can prove myself from the start, then my list will be much more attentive to what I have to say. If I can really help them, then I earn their trust. My whole philosophy has shifted recently and I'm now at the point where I want to concentrate all of my efforts on genuinely helping people. So my current method is: 1. Giving away my absolute best quality info for free 2. Building relationships/trust over time with my email list 3. Promoting only the products/services that I have tried and love Where are you at right now with your marketing? What methods are you currently putting to use?
I do a little article marketing, word of mouth, but mainly I do the only thing that really works in getting quality visitors, and then sales...advertising. I don't bother with forum posting and other such noob methods that don't work. But, some are so dellusional and or inexperienced to think it does. "Hey, I got 9 visitors today!!" And these minuscule visitors back out of the site again. heh ~
I use two main forms of marketing - PPC (depending on the promotion) and SEO marketing, including blogging, articles. On the PPC - I test a page to find out various things, such as the actual amount of traffic for the keywords that I am using, as well as what modifications might need to be done on the landing pages. I keep it inexpensive by using long-tail key terms only, and if it doesn't pan out by the time I've "paid" the commission for the sales item then I drop it and test out something else. Long-term, this can build up successful PPC campaigns over time that don't cost a lot to set up and run.
At the moment I'm using offline promotion (very basic flyers to be exact) to get traffic to a local affiliate program. It takes a while, and it's hard work. However, I have found that the conversion rate is higher with this method than online techniques. Flyers are highly geo-targeted, after all!
My main focus is video marketing on websites like youtube, dailymotion, break, yahoo video, meta cafe. Then I have 2 portal sites that help drive traffic to my forum. These portal sites are complete websites with articles videos and links to the forum. A couple of weeks ago I passed 3,000 subscribers on youtube. As of today I have 3,103 subscribers. My videos have been viewed over 1,658,987 times on youtube alone. As of today my forum has 6,004 total members, 1,939 members visiting every 30 days and 500 - 700 members visiting every 24 hours. Total traffic is around 30,000 unique a month worldwide and around 1.5 million page views and still going up. So far I have been very happy with my video marketing strategy. It has allowed my site to grow faster then my competition. My youtube subscribers and video views also continues to grow. The only thing I see changing is the style of videos, this is to keep the viewing audience interested and to attract a wider range of viewers.
I use several different marketing methods, but so far the marketing method that works the best for me is email marketing. I am growing my own list by running a lead capture page through the traffic exchanges and about 50 safelists. These efforts generate me approximately 50 to 75 new leads weekly. I am also uisng a marketing company that generates 50,000 leads for me every month through surveys and other methods, out of the 50,000 I am able to extract approximately 500 interested prospects to my main mailing list every month.
My strategies include:- Forum posting bookmarking link exchange and some SEO, not that i relly know what i am doing yet.