My 5 Favorite, but Often Ignored, Marketing Tactics

Thursday, 20 January 2011 11:44

You hear about marketing tactics like SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing, and email marketing all the time. You know they are effective, but they are so broad that it leaves you confused on how you actually can leverage those tactics for your website, right?

Well don’t worry, I am not going to discuss broad topics like that in this blog post, but instead I am going to break down 5 simple tactics that you should be using to increase your traffic and sales.

Marketing Tactic #1: It’s all about the long tail

Having good content on your website is great. The easiest way to do this is to start a blog. You can rank for thousands of keywords naturally and you’ll build up your company’s brand at the same.

Whether you already have a blog or not, there is one thing that you need to do if you want your long tail strategy to work well… you have to write really good content.

The easiest way to do this isn’t to write the content yourself, but it is to hire bloggers and either have them ghost write for you, or you can publish content under their name. And if you don’t know where to find them, just post an ad here and you’ll get over 100 applicants.

Once you go through the applicants and you find a few bloggers that you want to hire to write blog posts for $20, here are the requirements you need to give them:

• Quality over quantity – each blog post should be at least 1000 words long (without containing any fluff). The reason being is because you want really detailed content that provides value to the readers.
• A picture says 1000 words – you should have at least one picture within your blog post. It helps makes things easier for your readers. The bloggers you hire should be able to provide you with a picture.
• Are you smarter than a 5th grader – tell your writers to write as if they were talking to 5th graders. They don’t need to use crazy vocabulary and they should write each blog post with an introduction, body, and conclusion.
• Spice up your titles – the most important part of a blog post is the title. If it isn’t sexy, people won’t read it. Have your writers read Copyblogger’s headline formulas before they start writing for you.

With this content strategy, in the long run, you’ll notice that you will start getting a ton of traffic from search engines. You just have to be patient and more importantly be consistent with how many blog posts you publish each month. So make sure you are publishing at least 4 blog posts ever month.

Marketing Tactic #2: Homepages aren’t everything

A great way to boost your traffic is to build links to your internal pages. If you have a blog, you can signup for Zemanta and give them a few hundred bucks a month to get you clean, natural links to your blog posts. It works like a charm and you can end up getting deeps links to your internal pages for less than $15 a link.

If you want links to internal product pages, consider giving away prizes, t-shirts, and even products or services to bloggers to get them to blog on the stuff you are selling.

If you don’t have time to email out hundreds of bloggers, post an ad on Craigslist and you usually can find someone who will work for you for $10 to $12 an hour. Once you have a candidate who knows something about HTML and a few things about sales have them do the following:

1. Go to Alltop and find bloggers that could potentially blog about your site.
2. Before choosing certain bloggers to email, make sure you pick blogs that are semi popular, but aren’t the most popular blogs out there like TechCrunch. You can usually do this by checking each blogs Alexa ranking… anything above 30,000 and under 300,000 is typically worth emailing. Anything below 30,000 means that the blog is too popular and probably won’t be interested in reviewing your company.
3. Now you can email each of those bloggers and offer them something to review on their website. Make sure you don’t offer cash as you start getting into grey areas because you’re then technically paying for a review at this point.
4. Send out 30 to 50 emails a day to different bloggers and do this straight for 90 days.

After you do this for 90 days you’ll start noticing that the internal pages of your website will start getting a lot more traffic. In the long run, your internal pages should be getting more traffic than your homepage.

Marketing Tactic #3: There’s nothing wrong with exit pop-up’s

Before someone tries leaving your website, why not pop-up another window that collects their contact information? I know it may sound spammy, but if you do it right it won’t be too bad.

Here is what I recommend:

1. Pick your audience – don’t show everyone an exit pop-up, only show it to traffic sources that aren’t converting well for you. For example Google traffic isn’t converting that well on Quick Sprout, so I could show an exit pop-up to those visitors only and collect their name and email address so I can email them every time there is a new blog post.
2. Don’t be rude – cookie visitors so if someone comes back to your website, they won’t see the pop-up again. If you keep on showing pop-ups to the same people over and over again, they’ll get irritated.
3. Offer a gift – with your exit pop-up, offer them something for free to entice people to give you your name and email address. On Quick Sprout, I offer a free ebook.

Once you start collecting hundreds if not thousands of email addresses, you’ll start getting a lot more return visitors to your website and hopefully it will lead to more sales (assuming you are selling something).

Marketing Tactic #4: 5 dollars goes a long way

Facebook and Twitter can drive a lot of traffic so why not leverage them, right? Well you should, but they won’t be effective unless you have a lot of friends and followers.

The best way to build up your account is to follow and friend influential people within your industry. In addition to that, you should be tweeting and posting status updates that are also relevant to your industry.

Doing those two things will help you get a larger following in the long run, but it can take months if not years for that to be effective.

One way that I like to speed up the process is to pay people $5 to get me more relevant Facebook fans/friends and Twitter followers. On sites like Just a Five or Fiverr you can pay people $5 to build up your Facebook and Twitter account.

This way, when you write a new status update on Facebook or you tweet a message, thousands of people will be seeing it.

Marketing Tactic #5: Ask and you’ll receive

All of my startups are largely sales driven, so the more leads I collect, the more money I can potentially make.

One easy ways that you can collect more leads or get more signups is to add signup forms on your website. And if you add forms to your homepage and all other major pages, you’ll find that it is effective, but it tends to be a bit tacky.

What my business partner started doing is adding KISSinsights popups on certain parts of our site, like on our blog, so that we can collect more leads. The best part about it is that it looks clean and it is really effective in capturing web leads.

So if you have a sales driven business like me, start popping up KISSinsights forms that collect a person’s name and email address.

Conclusion

If you want to grow your traffic and revenue, you have to start testing out very specific marketing tactics. Don’t just say you are going to optimize your website for search engines, but instead say that you are going to build links to your internal pages, or that you are going to optimize your product pages for search engines.

If you stick with broad marketing tactics, you’ll never get anything implemented. But if you stick with quick and simple marketing tactics, after a month you’ll notice that you’ve accomplished a lot more.