I’ve spent a good deal of time lately studying various ways to market one’s product online. It’s a bit daunting at first, but the key is to organize your strategy to maximize your time. The world of internet marketing can be seductive: if you aren’t careful or if you lack a plan, you will quickly fall prey to irrelevant and/or shady programs.
That said, there are many good reasons for getting yourself out there via online marketing; chief among them are little to no overhead cost and potential to reach a huge target audience, no matter how “niche” your area of specialty is.
Stephanie Chandler, author of From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur and a highly successful marketer of virtual products, sums up these benefits nicely:
With the potential to reach millions of customers around the world, the Internet is a powerful business tool. The opportunities for promoting your business and products are abundant and don’t necessarily have to cost a lot of money.” (Chandler, 124)
In what follows, I’ll provide you with a few valuable internet marketing tools that I sometimes fail to see: we all know about email marketing, backlinks, autoresponders, and the importance of credible reviews–but what about other tools?
SEO CONTENT
Oddly enough, I don’t usually see “SEO Content” as a proposed method for internet marketing. Most internet marketing gurus, in my experience, tend to elaborate on the significance of SEO–which stands for Search Engine Optimization–under a different heading, or perhaps as part of a “writing tips” section.
The fact is that SEO content can make all the difference in the world and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be considered a way to promote your product online. If content is optimized for the search engines, it basically means that some or all of the following conditions have been realized:
*the websites in question have had their keywords submitted to all major search engines
*the content itself is consistent with the selected keywords
*the proper tags and metatags are in place and functioning
*within the page itself, the content and the keyword match up: meaning that keyword A/content A is consistent with keyword B/content B. In a nut shell, it means that the site is optimized for, for instance, Star Wars and Luke Skywalker, a major character in that series. You don’t want content that is optimized for Star Wars and “how to paint your house”.
FREE ARTICLE SUBMISSION WEBSITES
Submit your content, or other content that serves as an advertisement for your content, to article submission websites and directories
Article marketing represents a huge piece of the pie when it comes to making your presence known. As an example, consider my current blog about the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Sounds like an obscure topic, right? Well, article marketing played a huge role in allowing people searching for that kind of obscure content, and trust me, there are many–according to Google Keyword Analyzer–to access my stuff in a search. What they found at first probably wasn’t so much my website(s) but rather the articles I had written which ended up serving as ‘free’ samples of my larger product, if you consider my product to mean the entirety of my blog, which I was attempting to market. Over the summer, my unique visitors/day shot up by a good 50% from its earlier place. When I saw where my new visitors were coming from, I noticed that it was predominantly from free article submission websites.
Here is a brief list of some of the article submission websites I’ve used with success before:
Amazines.com
Searchwarp.com
goarticles.com
articlefinders.com
family-content.com
The above list is just to get you started. You ought to try to find article submission websites that are more “niche”. For instance, for a spirituality website I was promoting, I found
http://www.spiritualcenter-handsontheworld.com/spiritual/
This is a great place to naturally lead into the next area: online forums.
ONLINE FORUMS
I actually learned about that last article submission website (indirectly) from a fellow forum user. The user had answered another person’s question about article submission websites, and I clicked on a link which then linked with what eventually became the spiritual center article submission website.
And that’s represents the fundamental import of the forum service: not only does it give you a place to discuss and market your ideas–in addition to whatever virtual product you might be marketing–it gives you a place to learn of some great resources that probably aren’t common knowledge. By the way, the forums where I learned about the spiritual article submission website was the Digital Point Forum, and it’s a great place to start off.
Other forums I might consider looking at are:
www.about.com
www.myob-network.ryze.com
groups.yahoo.com
Don’t be afraid either to search for your area of interest + “forums” in Google. I’ve found that Google is pretty good at locating forums that are very relevant to the topic I searched for.
One last thing I’ll mention about forums is that the best ones often have relatively strict rules. For instance, Digital Point Forum only allows you to post a new topic after you’ve made 10 or more posts and have been a member for a certain period of time. Often times, to protect users from those who use the forum only to market their own product, forum admins will disallow outbound links within any post. Thus, if there’s going to be any sort of selling here, it won’t be direct selling, and most likely you’ll have to point people to your website in other, more subtle ways.
That said, forums are crucial because they allow a medium for discourse within a community–a community defined already by its interest in area(s) relevant to your product (hopefully).
ONLINE CLASSIFIED ADS
By now you’ve no doubt heard of or (hopefully) used Craigslist. I remember hearing recently that Craigslist is something like the 7th most-visited website in the World, though I can’t remember from where. In any event, I’m sure Craigslist receives several million visitors a day. Craigslist lets you put up an ad in your city of choice for free, and the submission form is very easy to fill out, while giving you relative freedom to say what you want–or don’t want. That said, you must renew it every two weeks: failure to do so will result in your ad being taken down.
By the way, in case you DON’T know, Craigslist is the internet’s largest classified ads website. Its URL is divided into various major cities. For instance, Boston’s craigslist is http://boston.craigslist.org/
Since Craigslist is free to use, and easy to use, there is no reason why you shouldn’t use it to point potential customers to your product, whether you’re selling something virtual or not. If you’re worried about security, by default Craigslist provides a random number at the end of a @craigslist.com email address–it doesn’t provide viewers with your email address, unless you want that information public.
Instant messengers are chat clients that provide users with instant communication that can occur within chat rooms or between two individuals. Instant messengers are great for quickly updating and/or notifyingi your client of a change or update regarding your product or service. I’ve noticed that increasingly, it seems, people are listing their IM user name as part of their contact information. Standard protocol says that you should still try to call individuals regarding business-type chatter, but instant messengers provide a great alternative–if only because they are so convenient!
Their impact on direct marketing is probably not that significant. But consider this analogy with the telephone: lets say you release a great product and its reviewed by someone of authority in the area. Let’s say that this authority figure mentions it to several of his friends on the telephone, but before he can refer you to them, he realizes you don’t have a phone number.
That kind of illustrates the importance of IM programs. The point is, instant messengers can serve as a medium for buzz talk about your product. If you’re not available at all through IM programs, people simply won’t talk to their friends about you if they use IM programs. Thus, the necessity of IM’s is more indirectly relevant to internet marketing, but it is something for you to think about, nonetheless.
Some of the major instant messenger programs include
AIM
ICQ
Yahoo Messenger
MSN Messenger
Do a search for any of them because some previous versions are more stable and may not be available at the official websites. Also note that they differ in terms of the capabilities they offer. ICQ was one of the first, if not the first, to users the ability to leave messages for their friends that were offline. AIM just recently added this function to their program.
Well, that’s it. This guide was intended for the basic internet user who may not be familiar with these avenues for creating buzz and promoting your product via online tools. Of course, just using these tools doesn’t guarantee anything: you must use them effectively, and that takes time.
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Works Cited
1. Chandler, Stephanie. From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur. John Wiley and Sons, Inc: Hoboken, NJ, 2007
