Master Marketing Plan & Checklist

Hi, thanks for everyones response. It seems that promoting a site doesn't cost that much money! One question, I find this article submission thing very intriguing and I think I will try out ArticlePostRobot.

1) Is there some sort of template that I should be following...ie putting the keywords and in the title and a few times in the text...and where do i add my URL?

2) Also...does replying to BLOG entries help promote my site?

3) say I have a website that is well optimized for SEO. and I do nothing but post one article per day through ArticlePostRobot. Would this generate any web traffic or rank and would the search engines eventually crawl my site?

 

I believe the article submissions take some time in the traffic sense - sites need to find the articles and post them w/ your link to their targeted (hopefully) traffic to start directing some of them to your site.

 

most article sites have a keyword box, you should pick a main keyword or keyword phrase and put it in your title and a few times throughout the article. Don't make it look salesy or self promotional. your url goes in the resource box

not sure about blogs

as for one article a day and nothing else it could take a while like mattern said. backlinks are the fastest way. I got about 120 links going to me now that finally kicked in and i got just under 1k uniques yesterday from under 200 a day. It will go up but you need to also give visitors a reason to return. My site has it good there with free guides for wow.

 

so after building a rich SEO ready website...after the large inital traffic push...along with daily article submission to articlerobotpost; what other daily tasks could I do? Basically I want to create a checklist..for about 1 hour of time per day...one would be the article submission...two would be? etc....any ideas?

 

You should really spend some more time looking at competing sites. What are they doing that seems to be daily or regular that might be bringing their visitors back? You can't just jump in and expect general marketing suggestions to be a big help. You don't have much of a base to work from yet as far as research. In general, lots of things work - daily blogging, tip of the day, changing news headlines, etc. But those mean absolutely nothing in some niches, and everything in others.

 

My site will be an extremely tight niche. It will be built around Amazon-o-Matic program, and all the pages will be search engine friendly. I plan on doing this with dozens of niches thoughtout the year. So I will build the site, have a large inital traffic push...than I just want a few daily tasks to perform to keep the backlinks multipling. My goal is to make about $5-$10 per day though Amazon and Adsense....multiply this with dozens of sites and eventually I will have a good revenue stream with very little maintance. This is my plan.

 

But my point is that what you're talking about is a "goal" not a "plan". It doesn't sound like you have a realistic and completely thought out plan yet. That's the biggest mistake you can make in marketing. Tight niche or not, you'll have some competition. You need to evaluate them, and your target market of readers to be able to choose the best tactics to use to reach them. You can reach anyone once, but if you want repeat visitors you have to understand them. You have no way of knowing if your plan is realistic for the little amount of time you want to put in every day after it's launched initially. I personally think working 1 hour per day is completely unrealistic, unless you mean an hour for each of these sites you're talking about. Even if you get alarge initial traffic push, you have to keep marketing just as much if you want to keep just as much traffic. It sounds as though you're working under the assumption that those original visitors are going to keep coming back, so you only have to market a little bit later to keep more coming in. That's not how it works unfortunately. Marketing is neverending, and you won't continually get the same results with less work unless you have major brand recognition - and very few websites have that compared to the number out there.

 

Thanks for your thoughts and opinions Jenn...it is very much appreciated. You seem very knowledgable about this topic. I was always under the impression and I thought that my Associate-O-Matic program would generate the content. And after my inital traffric promotion, all that I had to do was a few daily tasks, to keep the backlinks growing. Keep in mind...all I expect is $5-$10 per day PER SITE to be made using Affiliate...but I will be creating many sites! It seems this should be easy. Thanks again Jenn!

 

The key word though is "seems." There are a lot of people with the same thought, and most don't reach their goals nearly as quickly as they anticipate, if ever. If it were that easy, everyone would be setting up a bunch of affiliate sites and making a small fortune. But in reality, only a small percentage are able to make something like that work, and those would generally be the type who continually market the heck out of them.

 

what exactly do you mean by looking at competing sites to see what they're doing? I have heard this before but I don't know where to start here besides checking backlinks and pr.

As far as traffic goes, I'm pretty new to seo. I was so retarted with it no book could help me, I read it and remembered some of it but just couldn't put 2 and 2 together. I'm more of the math person who can pick up my math book and learn anything. Had a friend explain it to me a bit and less than a week later i'm jumping 1k unique hits per day just from backlinks and smart keyword choices. The way my friends site, and mine are now. I don't see anyway to really keep marketing besides weekly or monthly maintenance like getting more links, maybe articles, sigs on blogs and forums etc.

 

Do some research on your competitors' sites. Don't just look at what Google can tell you about them; although that certainly won't hurt. Read their "about us" page. See if they have a press room, past news about their site, media kit, etc. Larger sites especially will often include a comprehensive media kit discussing their user demographics for advertisers' benefits. It's market research gold for you when you're starting out, b/c if it's a direct competitor, you're getting insight on demographics you might not have even known. If there's a parent company, visit their site and look for the same kinds of things. Search for reader/user complaints about the company. By learning their mistakes, you'll be able to avoid them yourself. Look for any advertising done by the company or anything marketing-related (ie archived newsletters). If they kept something up, it was likely working. If they changed their tagline, name, logo, or anything pretty quickly, it wasn't working for a reason.

The best thing you can do marketing-wise is to create a word of mouth buzz. Once you get it going, it grows on its own. Look into viral marketing techniques to get people to help spread the word on their own. If you want to be hands-off for the most part, let your visitors work for you. Just don't assume links are all it takes. Search engines change all the time. Links may not be weighted the same tomorrow, and your rankings could drop. You should always look beyond it. SEO can help you lay a good foundation, and it's important; but it shouldn't be the only part of your marketing plan. Try viral marketing, relationship marketing (newsletters, special offers just for repeat visitors... things along those lines to keep them coming back), PR/publicity (press releases if you do something newsworthy, write an op-ed or letter to the editor of the nearest metropolitan paper or an online media outlet about your position on a controversial topic somehow related to your site and include the url... etc.).... There are a lot of niche areas in marketing that you can explore, and how well they each work will depend on your site and its topic area. The best way to choose what to try is to see what's working for others in your niche first. Then branch out to experiment with other things when you have some steady traffic.

Jenn

 

I thought viral marketing was bad. I tried to set it up once and I was told that it would get my adsense account banned super fast.

 

There are a lot of types of viral marketing. What exactly was it that you tried?

 

The number of pages on the Internet might be 1000x more than nowadays for 10 years. So you might have to add more content to be able to keep on hits.

I think that adsense gold rush is over. There are no more good mines

 

I too think the Gold rush is over but only for sites that you can buy in bulk from ebay, content that is not yours or scrapped.

If you build sites with your own valuable content they will be around. And 1 way to monitize it is adsense.

If you are looking for $5 a day per site, mini-sites with unique content is a way. An intresting read might be the ebook from Tim Gorman which is called Article Blitz I think. You also might think about building a big site and add daily more unique content.

Building traffic with the advice here and on other posts on dp will come but don't expect to have thousands in a few days.

Most important thing is ...have a system and stick to it. Have a list of tasks and workt thru them..Add content regualry and build traffic by submitting the articles, look for link exchanges, newsletters etc

 

Hi All,

I consider myself new to Internet Business (started only in Feb 06). However, I am fortunate to have a good coach (my ex-boss!!!), and even more fortunate to have found DP and other useful forum.

However, one of the most important thing I learned is that marketing plan is not about how you spend money. It is about how you will move from phase to phase, how to get and judge market feedback, etc. Spending money is call "budgeting". It is best to have a marketing plan before having a budget. Otherwise most money will not be spend wisely.

Anyway, about "National Enquirer", I assume it is a news paper? (I am not from US, and http://www.nationalenquirer.com/ is down to me) I have good result from a local newspaper to my Make-for-AdSense site, giving me about $15 to $20 per day. However, it only work because I have an offline business, so I can afford to advertise daily for my offline business. I added a line for people to get information online within my newspaper ad - which is my Make-for-AdSense site.

If you have any further information on "National Enquirer" I will be very happy to learn it from you. Thanks!

 

Hi, The National Enquirer is a tabloid newspaper based in the USA that has a readership of 11 million people in the USA and Canada. A very large reach. This is off-line marketing. It caught my attention when I saw an ad for "loans" when I went to the URL listed, it was an ADSENCE page. The cost for a 10 word ad is $144. You have to be VERY creative to get people to read your ad and want to log-in to the internet and go to your site. Here is an example of how it works...say your ad reads: FREE CELLPHONE, go to www.XYZ.com
Than at your site, you can either have an amazon affiliate link, or ADSENCE ad that gives someone a FREE CELLPHONE, when they sign up for a year of service.

If someone was very creative, they can make a killing just with one ad...problem is, it is easy for someone to copy your ad for the next issue. Basically its a $144 risk.

 

Aboutit,

in looking at your site briefly, the images above the G Adsense ads could violate their TOS & you get banned from G. look at this thread below: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17104&highlight=visible+border

 

i'm still changing them some. other pages like the ragnaros guide or onyxia guide have a border there. I'm still tweaking it around. The line really makes no difference imo.