Forum Moderators: open
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I run a site <with offerings targeting> small businesses. We are undergoing good growth (500K imp / month & 30K uniques / month in a little under a year) - but we are looking at taking it to the next level (getting to 1M impression a month asap and further growth beyond), and want some ideas about what would be useful avenues to follow. It is a slick site, a good product and honed based on lots of customer feedback. We have several thousand active users (and many thousands more who have signed up).
We do not have a big budget for marketing (approx £1K a month) - but we could obtain more funds if the right marketing initiatives were found (in terms of ROI). Our current marketing activities include:
SEO
Building Word-of-mouth
Adwords
PR subsmissions
Email marketing
Blogging
The latter four marketing approaches speak for themselves. I'll elaborate a bit more on our SEO and Word-of-mouth initiatives:
SEO
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We get a significant amount of traffic through search engines (especially Google) - though I must say I am a little disappointed with the level of traffic it delivers versus my expectations...
On Google.co.uk, we are top 1 or 2 on all of our most relevant terms, and their variants (say 6 'subjects'). These terms and not obscure but very popular search terms amongst the business community. We are also in the top ten for many hundreds of others. We do not perform so well on Google.com (in the top 10-20 for those most relevant terms - I conclude not many people use Google.co.uk!). Either way, I think we are pretty good on SEO (and we convert 10-15% of the visitors that we receive into sign-ups) - we have many thousands of relevant external links to our site, a good SE friendly internal link structure, lots of relevant user-generated content etc. We could obviously do with building our Google.com ranking a bit more, but I think that both time and other influences will achieve this, rather than changing our already well-performing SEO strategy.
Building Word-of-mouth
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We do get a fair amount of word-of-mouth referrals, but, unfortunately, the small business community are not a very chatty audience (to each other), so we cannot expect the rate of a social network or consumer based site. We have incoporated many passive 'viral' techiniques into the software as part of its use to spread the word, and also to encourage people to link to us.
As you can see, we have a sound marketing strategy IMO, but we are a little frustrated at getting the growth curve to curve a bit steeper upwards!
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Anyway, sorry for the epic (hopefully this post may offer some good advice to those who are getting started with marketing a website), but I shall now state my question:
Is there anything I'm missing as part of a coherent marketing strategy?
I'm only looking for legitimate techniques - I don't subscribe to gaming the search engines. Some other things I've been considering include:
1. Listing in some more relevant directories to further build traffic and links - does anybody have any experience, or can they provide relevant directories?
2. Emailing 'advisors' (Bookkeepers/Accountants/Advisors etc.) to small businesses to state that we might enhance their offering by pointing their customers to us.
3. (Trying to!) form a partnership with a brand that already has a captive small business audience (e.g. a bank).
If you can think of anything that would be useful - offline or online, traditional or new, please let me know.
Thanks for your help.
[edited by: caveman at 7:14 pm (utc) on Dec. 19, 2007]
[edit reason] Removed specifics, per TOS. [/edit]
Given the way you've posed your question, sounds like this fabulous post by sugarrae might be a good thought-starter for you:
Link Development Versus Traffic Development [webmasterworld.com]
