It’s been crazy busy around here the past few weeks and for good reason. The whole thing came to a head over the past few days. Because in the last two days I launched all 21 videos for Sabdamala.com to hundreds of prospects. So, in the last 48 hours I had to coordinate a free and paid membership section of the website, create email newsletters with explicit offers and update a plethora of documents. All of this was a huge task indeed. I’m glad to have it all done and behind me!
In the midst of this process a friend of my asked me what I was doing to drive traffic to my website and hence develop this market. This friend is fairly new to Internet Marketing and hence he wanted to hear about the fundamental tools I had used. I decided to write this up to not only answer his question but also make it available to anyone else who might be interested.
So, here is the list of tools I used to drive traffic, build a email newsletter database and eventually drove revenue:
1. Google AdWords (Pay-per-Click) – I needed quick instant traffic so I turned to Google’s AdWords program. Since the search volume on my top keywords is not very high I decided to only use the content network. The content network allowed me to gain exposure via relevant websites and also helped to drive relevant traffic. At first I let Google find the sites for me, but over time I started to be selective about the sites and also included some of my own.
2. Facebook PPC – Unlike MySpace, Facebook has a superb ad business model that allows small businesses to reach its 400 million plus members. My market is fairly small in the greater scheme of things. However, with the right descriptor phrases I was able to find over 15,000 FB members within my geo-target. I created two ads with differing ad text and eventually settled one one (based on performance). I was able to drive a lot of traffic this way with only a $5 per day budget.
3. Affiliate Marketing Partners – From the very beginning it was my goal to develop a group of very strong affiliate partners. I was able to identify two very strong partners with exceptional websites. These partners included my ad on their websites and also sent out emails on my behalf. Currently I am tracking the traffic from these sites and will be sharing revenue with them as it comes. I have learned that having affiliate partners who believe in your product is very important if you’re seeking to drive traffic to your website.
4. Association Marketing – This is a bit unique to my market but there are 15-20 associations that I was able tap into in order to get the message out to my market. These are regional associations that serve this particular market at the local level. I personally emailed association leaders seeking their support. The response wasn’t as enthusiastic as I’d expected, but that was due more to the newness of the relationship than anything else. In the end support from these associations helped drive awareness and acceptance.
5. Traditional media – Internet marketers love to focus on the latest online tools and services and oftentimes forget about the power of traditional media. By sending out press releases and providing radio interviews I was able to obtain a fair amount of exposure in my target market. I was also able to enhance the credibility of my business once articles appeared on traditional media outlets. This reputation building helped to assure customers of the product and service.
With all this great traffic coming to the website I needed something to create a dialogue with visitors. If you think about it this is the most important part of the whole process. You need to have a specific strategy on utilizing this traffic. If you don’t then you’re making a fundamentally bad mistake.There are lots of things you can do with this traffic. And I ended up asking them to join my email newsletter.
After capturing their email addresses I communicated the value they would receive and why the needed to subscribe if they wanted to benefit from my services. Once I had their email address I communicated with them on a weekly basis. I set up an account with Constant Contact to facilitate this process. I found that about 20% of visitors were leaving their email addresses. In a few short weeks had a database of over 400 prospects. All of a sudden I now had a database to market to and that is where I was able to walk prospects through a purchase cycle!
The rest as they say is history.
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- WebTotal Marketing Presentation (slideshare.net)