WebGunForHire.com: Web Site Marketing 3

Advice Archive: Web Site Marketing (p. 3 of 3)
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Subj: Free/Low-Cost Site Marketing Strategies

This is some free advice I gave to a client who wasn't getting much traffic to the e-commerce Web site we built for them:

In regards to the difficulties you're having driving traffic to your new site, I'd like to once again mention the option of a very low-cost but effective Web marketing campaign you could implement using temporary help. Since summer's almost here, what about trying to hire some high-school kid to work part-time running a Web marketing campaign for you? Here are the advantages:

1. You already have a usable marketing plan laid out in the document we gave you on Marketing Your Website (additional copies available upon request). Give the kid a copy of it and tell him to focus specifically on the 'free' but powerful online marketing options available to you:

--Playing the search engines
--Finding, contacting, and getting worthwhile (reciprocal) links to other sites (the more closely related to your customers, the better)
--Researching and (perhaps) joining a banner exchange program (assuming you'd have a banner to send out).

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2. You could rather easily track the progress of an online marketer's job by having him or her report on an ongoing basis on the results of all of these activities. An example of documentation you might require from this person would be the URL submission report we provided you (which you could have them use as a template), as well as the e-mail confirmations that many search engines send. Furthermore, most banner exchange programs provide detailed reports on weekly banner activity. You could also have this person read your monthly site activity reports and try to correlate marketing activity to actual site activity (a less-than-scientific process, but of some value nonetheless).

3. You could also have this person investigate and report on paid online advertising options, including the many low-cost options available, just so you and AHC would have a better handle on your cyberstore's marketing environment. But even without actually undertaking any paid advertising, I think you'll find that if you have someone dedicating 20 hours a week or so to focusing strictly on the 'free' online marketing options available to you, you'll start to get more visitors to your site.

4. All you really need to provide this person with to get the job done is a desk with a computer hooked up to the Internet and MSWord for them to create the required documentation. And now you'll silently thank those annoying filters on your Internet access at work so the kid can't wander where he/she shouldn't.

Just an idea. There are of course low-cost online marketing agencies that can help you with all of this also. Personally, I like the idea of a part-timer/intern because I think it will provide your organization the most value in terms of gaining more direct knowledge about the new business environment of the Internet as well as providing a valuable learning opportunity to whoever does it. Anyway I just wanted to present this idea again as one option that you might want to consider.

--WebGunForHire, 04/00

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Fine Print: WebGunForHire reserves the right to answer or not answer any given post. WebGunForHire makes no warranty, either expressed or implied, and no claim as to the results of heeding his advice. This advice is given freely and its actual value may therefore be directly proportional to the fee charged for it. WebGunForHire may offer legal, business, technical, or personal recommendations. However WebGunForHire holds no accreditation nor license from any recognized authority in any of these fields, apart from a PMP in Project Management and lessons learned from a long and varied life.