Marketing

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Marketing doesn’t have to be this boring, complicated formula that most people don’t understand. The bottom line to marketing is that if you haven’t generated an audience, you don’t yet have a business. When it comes to internet based businesses, you could have the best content ever but if you don’t have any traffic coming to your site, you won’t make any sales. It’s as simple as that.

If you’re selling a product that makes you $20 per sale and converts at 20% and you only have ten people visiting your website every month, then you’d only be making $40 per month. However, if you were getting 100 visitors at the same rate, all of a sudden your monthly income from that product would be $400. Think about when you start getting 500 hundred visitors or 5000 even.

If your content is of great value and if your homepage is captivating, you have nothing to worry about. All of your energy should be spent on driving traffic to your site instead. So simply put, if you’re getting traffic and if your content is good enough for that traffic to hang around, you will make sales.

The videos further down in this post are there to give you some ideas of how you can market your site through the internet. These strategies are effective but they’re also fairly basic. Anyone who’s even at an intermediate level of internet marketing would agree. So in addition, I want to introduce you to one of the most powerful ways of marketing; the media and word of mouth.

I would say that the only form of marketing to rival the use of media is advertising. What’s awesome about gaining exposure through the media is that it’s more credible and it’s free. In order to do this, there will need to be some kind of incentive for them. Money For Traveling have a great section on how to use interviewing as a powerful way of tapping into lists of thousands of people in their Passive Income blueprint.

The thing with the media is that if you can find a way to make them look better, you can often gain publicity in return. The best incentive that you could offer is credibility and reputation and the same goes for funding. You must have an incentive to offer, that’s how deals work.

A common example of this is sponsorship. If a professional tennis player is playing well, it’s likely that several high profile brands will be interested in sponsoring them. If the tennis player is using their racquet or wearing their extra grippy shoes, the idea is that the company will gain a good reputation.

Let’s say that you’re interested in creating a documentary on 4WDriving from England to China. What you could do is get in touch with a 4WD manufacturer about sponsoring you by providing you with a vehicle. Because you’re making a documentary and potentially gaining exposure, this gives them the chance to prove the durability of their 4WD. Now let’s say you were doing it for a cause, like raising money for orphanages in China. Not only are you doing something good that you believe in but in them funding you, they can also potentially establish a good reputation.

 

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The media is simply something that goes out into the public and attracts attention. This could be in the form of public speaking, TV, radio, YouTube, interviews, newspapers, magazines, talk shows, flyers and basically anything else that fits into this category. Even a successful blog or website is considered to be a form of media. You don’t have to be a guest on the Oprah Show to take advantage of the media. There are plenty of up and coming media outlets all over the place that would love to promote free content if it’s valuable. You just have to think outside of the box and look around.

When you’re using a blog or a website to draw traffic, you become the media. Just like people can pay to advertise on websites, they can often gain that same exposure for free. There are people who contact other websites about writing articles for them. If the content is good, the website gets good content for free. Sounds good? But what the article writer gets in return is exposure in the form of attribution and a back link to their own website. So you can be the media and you can work the media. They’re extremely effective strategies and there’s plenty of opportunity in both.

Another great strategy is to get the public involved. There’s a magazine called DJ Mag that targets aspiring DJs, music producers and fans of electronic dance music. Every year they hold a poll called the DJ Mag Top 100 where fans from all around the world get to vote for their favourite DJ. This sounds simple enough but the results are huge. Because these top DJs and producers want to win, they promote themselves and encourage their fans to vote for them.

If you think about guys like Tiesto and David Guetta, these guys have fan bases of millions of people. Multiply that by the thousands of contestants who are trying to make the list and you’ll quickly realise just how much publicity DJ Mag are getting. Again, you’ll need an incentive for this. DJ Mag awards prize money to the winner but this is not necessary. Often of times, the honour is enough.

Let’s say you set up a competition or a poll within your local community called “Restaurant Of The Year” where people go online and submit their votes. What you’ll get is a number of restaurants handing out flyers and promoting your website without necessarily even realising it.

Even by providing people with a platform where they can have their say, you can often create a lot of publicity. Look at big review sites like tripadvisor.com. People love to talk about what’s relevant to themselves, just look at all of the arguments on YouTube. By making your marketing interactive, you can generate crazy amounts of new traffic. Marketing doesn’t have to be tasteless and annoying, in fact it can be quite fun. Make note of any idea that you get and try it out. Let me know what you can come up with.

Social Bookmarking And Pinging
When it comes to internet marketing, some of the first things that you should know about are bookmarking and pinging. You may be wondering how the search engines like Google and Yahoo find new blogs or websites. Well here’s how…

 

 

 

 

 

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