Marketing | Alex Tran

To Generate Traffic To Your Website, Try Being Social

December 14, 2008 By Alex 1 Comment

Generating traffic to your website is an important topic. Without traffic, your online presence would be for naught. You’ve heard of the paradox, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody was there to hear it, did the tree really fall?” The equivalent paradox online is, “If you have a website and got no visitors, then do you really have a website?”

Luckily, there are many ways to generate traffic to your website. Here is a quick list: blog, publish articles, submit press releases, create feeder sites on Hubpages, Quizilla and Wetpaint, comment on blogs, comment in forums, run eBay ads, post ads in newspapers, run pay-per-click, run content ads, run cost-per-view, create a free software download, create an iPhone application, post on billboards, post in ezines, rent a mailing list, call people, post jobs, post on Yahoo answers, join syndicates, and social bookmark.

Whew. How long do you think it’ll take to go through that partial list of traffic generating strategy? So where should we start. Since the focus of this blog post is on being social, let’s talk about social bookmarking.

In the old days, which was two years ago in internet time, people bookmarked cool sites using the bookmark feature of their browser. The problem was that the bookmarks were trapped on one computer. If they used another computer, say at the library, they wouldn’t be able to access their bookmarks. Bummer. The other problem was that their friends couldn’t access their bookmarks either … “If you bookmarked a really cool site, and nobody else knew about it, was it really a cool site?”

Then one day, smart internet-types decided to liberate the bookmarks that were trapped in people’s computers. Thus was born the age of the internet bookmarks. Sites like Clipmarks, Delicious, Magnolia, Faves, Mr. Wong, Furl, Reddit, and a hundred others popped up like mushrooms. A good idea doesn’t stay lonely for long.

This was also the beginning of a brand new way of getting traffic to your website. If you have a cool website or a cool article or a cool tool on your website, people will bookmark it and share it with their friends who will share it with their friends and so on. Eventually, your coolness will be validated across the internet. And that is how you will get traffic.

Does it work? Yes and no. If you do have good content, people will find you via bookmarks. I launched a site about a month ago with some good content. Within two weeks, I had 1,800 visitors via bookmarking. That was an example of a site with cool content. Another site I launched didn’t get as many visitors. In fact, it got far less at only 25 uniques a day. Clearly, the latter site was not cool.

So there you have it. If you want traffic, create cool content, bookmark your content, be social, and watch the flood of unique visitors come to your website.

By the way, bookmarking can be a time-consuming process. Here are two aggregate bookmarking sites that can save you time:

* www.socialmarker.com

* www.socialposter.com

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: Delicious, Digg, Furl, Internet bookmark, Reddit, Social bookmarking

5 Easy Steps to Successfully Market a Product on the Internet

December 11, 2008 By Alex Leave a Comment

We’ll begin by assuming that your product or service is of high quality and has intrinsic value to your customer. Your product is ready, but are you? Many a website has suffered an ignominious demise, only because the owner didn’t do the proper preparation in marketing. Here we look at five basic, but essential components of how to market a product on the web.

1. Define your market. This may seem obvious, but many people neglect this step. You cannot assume that everyone on the planet will find your product useful. If you use the shotgun approach as a marketing strategy, you’re effectively shooting yourself in the foot. We’ll look at a service as our example. A service is also a product, in that you are providing a product which saves your customer time and money. A service can be a bit more tricky to manage, but you can apply the methodology to a product as well.

Let’s say you want to know how to market a product which takes care of small business accounting needs. Your market is finite, but still huge. Your audience is small to medium-sized businesses, which perhaps have a website, but lack the means to record and store sales data adequate to their needs. There are some costly, big-name packages that do the job. You want to target businesses which can’t afford a big-ticket service and are therefore open to yours. Explore every niche business and compile your specific audience.

2. Develop your advertising campaign. You’ll learn much about how to market a product on the net when you devise an array of advertising strategies. Visit sites which provide advice on various marketing strategies. In the case of our sample product, you might do well to provide feature articles to an e-newsletter focusing on small business issues. Contact the Chamber of Commerce in major metropolitan areas. Always remember to expend your advertising efforts by ‘writing to your audience.’ Use free advertising venues as much as possible and spend advertising dollars judiciously, to reach the greatest number of your potential customers.

3. Make sure you deliver your product or service promptly and securely. Many would-be marketers get shot down here. No matter how much research you’ve done in developing your advertising strategies with your eye firmly focused on the best methods on how to market a product, if you can’t or don’t deliver, all your effort is for naught.

4. Keep your communications open. Respond to customer communications as quickly as possible. This builds credibility.

5. Get some links and content going. Have plenty of free content on your website which gives your visitors information they can use. The more links you have pointing to your site, the better.

Follow these basic guidelines on how to market a product on the net and you’ll achieve success!

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: Advertising, Advertising campaign, Business, Chamber of commerce, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Marketing strategy, Small business

B2B Advertising vs. B2C Advertising

December 4, 2008 By Alex Leave a Comment

Almost all of us are familiar with the term advertising. Some of us may even be involved in the field of advertising, either as practitioners or as clients. But there is nobody among us who does not know what advertising does or how it is useful in helping us make a decision. But how many of us know what B2B advertising means? How many of us are even aware of the term? Is it a new kind of advertising? Is B2B advertising a new trend in the advertising industry? Is B2B advertising the herald of things to come? Not really!

Simply put B2B Advertising is nothing but business to business advertising. In the vast majority of advertising that most of us are familiar with, we see examples of B2C or business to consumer advertising. Businesses want to sell to consumers and hence use B2C advertising to achieve that aim. But what abut B2B advertising? As the name suggests, B2B advertising is nothing but advertising that a business uses to advertise its products or services to another business. But why would a business need to advertise to another business through a channel like B2B advertising? Think again and you will find the answer to that question!

Contrary to popular belief, no business produces a product alone. Most products we use in our day to day lives are actually the coming together of the expertise of several businesses. Take the everyday automobile for instance. Let’s say you own a Ford car. Now while Ford Motors may have produced the finished product and sold it to you through a dealer, there are several other companies and businesses in the background that have put together your car. The steering wheel for instance could have been
manufactured by one business. The seats and upholstery could have been manufactured by another business. Even the body of the car and the engine itself could have been manufactured by wholly different businesses. Ford Motors therefore is little more than a collating agency that brings together all the products manufactured by different businesses to produce an automobile that you buy and use.

This is where B2B advertising comes into the picture. Each individual business that manufactures different parts of the car uses B2B advertising to reach out to other businesses. Which is why Ford, Chevrolet and Chrysler could all have procured their steering wheels from a single manufacturer! And how do these businesses use B2B advertising? Through what has come to be known as strategic publications. You will rarely find B2B advertising in the mainstream newspapers. That is almost exclusively reserved for B2C advertising. But in strategic publications, which are publications specific to one particular industry, B2B advertising is the mainstay. Unlike in the mainstream advertising channels like newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet, strategic publications almost never publish B2C advertising! They are dedicated to publishing B2B advertising, which has grown into a billion dollar industry. And the biggest and the best of the agencies too have B2B advertising divisions to cater to this part of the revenue.

Filed Under: Marketing

Recent Post

Small Business Taxes Gone Wild In California

You Got the Opt-in, Now What? Here Are Some Top Email Strategies

Linkedin Company Page Follows the Leaders Facebook and Yelp

A Way to Promote Your Business with Facebook Events

Featured Post

How to Remove Antispyware Soft

Featured Video