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I've been absorbing like a sponge the ideas on these pages, doing some things 'wrong' but learning many useful things. Probably optimization methodologies can increase click through rates/revenues by a further 50 per cent (and without much effort) but I believe the biggest gains will occur once site traffic reaches its potential. My targets are an increase of 100x current volumes within my niche. (While this number is large, because five or six of my 'old' domains are established, but without any marketing, I am getting the proportional amount of business on those sites without any marketing or publicity; in other words it is purely natural traffic. It is not a stretch to extrapolate to the other relevant regional/local and specialized sub-niche markets served by the concept).
The bigger challenge and the one I seek your input on are the best ways to 'market' the sites. Note I have done nothing yet in this area because it seemed foolish to market the sites until basic systems and optimization is in place. Now it is time to get serious. Here are some directional ideas gleaned from these pages; your input and suggestions about which are most effective to you are most welcome.
1. Email campaign to existing subscriber/permission database; approximately 5,000 names in about 5 of the 100 market areas.
2. Weekly newletter (permission based), to respondents to existing markets, encourage viral forwarding and subscriptions; also of course use newsletter for other inbound inquiries.
3. Selective adwords arbitrage purchases; testing initially within samples of existing and new markets;
4. Print media advertising (my own publications!)
5. Print media advertising -- paid (much more expensive, of course.)
6. Relationship marketing within specialized groups and forums within frame of market interest (one group has a network of approximately 5,000 members, with several relevant local chapters, and provides good subject/interview material for articles to go on sites and in newsletters.)
These will never be super-high volume sites, it is a specialized industry/sector, that fortunately attracts some reasonably high PPC levels on Adsense.
My question for others here is what has been your best outreach marketing approach based of course on the prinicipals of your sites truly being worth visiting? I am especially interested in your observations if you are working within business to business sectors.
What you propose seems like a lot of hard work. Why not just produce something of real interest that people naturally want to link to and let nature take its course? Both involve work, but this way afterwards you just sit back and watch. I added nothing or did nothing for years. Its actually easier in the end! Your way means if you ever stop working on it your traffic dissapears and you pay most of your income back in advertising.
I never did anything. A good site will fly on its own.
Aww, c'mon Nitrous. You have a great success story, but are you really going to claim it's due in overwhelming part to following a formula as opposed to being the right person in the right place at the right time? Your way ain't gonna be the best way for everybody, right?
Not all good sites are going to fly on their own (unless you define "good" to mean "able to fly on its own"), and surely there are good sites that could fly a whole lot better with some reasonable marketing applied.
However, if I just rely on the content and search engine backlinks to attract traffic, it will be a long wait, I fear. If I can attract traffic, I think the sites will be (now that they are ready for public viewing) good enough for repeat/referral visits and some viral marketing. Passive content building in itself is not the way to go, however.
The reason for my original posting was to validate the marketing road map and double check to see if there are other approaches you may have found effective in the business-to-business sector.
I am trying to be helpful. You all make it sound so complicated. Just build sites that people like and want on subjects you understand! Money follows with the traffic that this naturally gets.
I dont even use paid hosting! My sites wrer written for fun and to share useful niche info well before adsense. They dont even look very professional, and real web designers would laugh. I only have 5 main sites with say 25 pages of real html content. And another 10 that never got finished or never got much traffic. The first five earn 95 percent of the 4k monthly I earn.
Its just like books, films, events, etc. If its worth checking out people, other magazines and newspapers all talk about it. That brings the same success on the internet. You get links naturally from all over the place.
Writing some "content" for the sake of it just wont cut it!
If your site is really of any use, or interesting or offers something different then you will be successful. Its that simple!
If you have to push it then think again!
Loads of companies for eg go bust advertising some product or other that "copies" the original. Dont copy, fill, make hundreds of pages, innovate! Be original. Write about stuff that you know more about than anyone else, or be the first online "whatever" etc.
Much of what you read in the conventional media (or I will suggest, see on the web) results from 'spin doctors' and public relations/media planners with a co-ordinated marketing strategy Obviously, it is great when you have something that sells itself naturally and produces great results but great content will remain unnoticed if no one sees/finds it -- and I see nothing wrong with providing a bit of a boost to get it moving.
Remember, I am only planning this strategy AFTER my sites have enough relevance and original material and are user friendly enough to attract registrations for newsletter and repeat visits.
You may not need/want to do this, but possibly you could optimize your sites/revenue with a bit of strategic marketing yourself.
I am trying to be helpful. You all make it sound so complicated. Just build sites that people like and want on subjects you understand! Money follows with the traffic that this naturally gets.
Nitrous I completely agree. It seems to me that everyone tries to complicate something that isn't that difficult. I think that the biggest problem is everyone wants to get rich quick, and it probably will not work.
Build a site with good content and everything else will fall into place. It probably will not happen over night. Most of us spent years to get where we are now.
I'm not playing games with MFAs and trying to find magic keywords -- I am working within a specific industry sector I know well. When I do marketing, I will measure response and retention rates carefully. The purpose of the original posting was to see if others here have discovered effective marketing models. This is not a get rich quick scheme. But it is not a hobby, either.
There's an attitude around here in some posts that if you approach it as a business, you're somehow less noble than those who run sites just for the fun of it.
Why on earth would anyone want to wait years for success when its simply not necessary if you've got some marketing smarts?
And at the same time makes the internet less useful. Enough "marketing" people and there is less real useful sites and more garbage on the net. Maybe you dont care but I do.
Plus anyone making money without any useful wanted sites is just taking the advertisers money and adding nothing in return. Real sites then lose out. I have a real useful site and dont see why I should lose out to scammers, mfas, shallow "content" article type sites etc. Seems to me that if you cant offer anything good/useful/wanted then you are a scavenger.
Not all other types of site are scammers but its actually easier to build a good site that do all your "marketing" because it naturally does it for you!
There's a gap, though. Unless you do some initial marketing, and build up a community of sites that might be interested in your content, people will never link to it. But you'll be surprised at how quickly the fires can spread if you've got material of interest.
The best way to build an instinct for that is visit communities related to the material in your website. What kinds of stories, websites, etc are people talking about? Can you put together some material that they'd want to talk about?
It's the best possible marketing you can do.
Why on earth would anyone want to wait years for success when its simply not necessary if you've got some marketing smarts?
It takes years to build a foundation that will last. Internet companies come and go. They go up quickly and come down just as quick.
But that's probably the exception, not the rule, and as such, does not make for a blueprint that all can follow.
I'd guess that for every site that gets traffic with no marketing ... just because the site is good ... there are 20 or 100 other good sites that flounder. You need to have not only great content, but ideally the site needs to be in the right place, at right time, and perhaps even enjoy a little luck for that strategy to work.
Also like I said, it depends on the goals of the site owner. $4K a month might be thrilling for some and way below goal for others.
The comments in this thread that I personally most disagree with are those that suggest that marketing a good site is too hard, requires too much work, and/or will not pay out.
With a little marketing savvy and a just a reasonable amount of effort, the difference between a good site with no/poor marketing, and a good site with good marketing, can be 5X or 10X the revenue, at maybe 2X the work. Hard not to like those numbers. ;-)
But that doesn't mean that everyone should run out and start marketing their sites either. Some posters prefer to work on their good sites and see the rewards roll in organically. Others prefer to apply marketing to their good sites in an effort to multiply their rewards. I say: Whatever works!
Speaking just personally, without the use of well developed marketing strategies and tactics, my company would be only a tiny fraction of its current size. And not only did marketing get us there, but the constant fluctuations that purely organic results lead to are softened.
Also, really good site marketing leads to it's own set of organic rewards. There's a huge muliplier effect involved that people either forget about, or don't fully appreciate.
