Many, many times. You know it well. Every marketing guru has spoken about this topic. I’m sick of hearing it. But it STILL bears repeating.

Because some people still don’t get it. What’s the underlying principle for successful online marketing, selling or networking? The art of giving before you try to get. Before you get something from someone, you need to first give them a reason for them to give it to you.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t you know that everyone has walls around them? Don’t you see them at all? They don’t like to be scammed out of their money. That’s why they’re cautious and won’t just click to buy immediately. They don’t like to waste their hard earned salary on crappy products or services. That’s why they do a thorough research online. 

They don’t want to be lied to. That’s why they are hesitant to believe what you say or claim. They don’t want their feelings to be exploited. That’s why they are wary about trusting you with their true thoughts. They have been fooled before and no one wants to feel stupid again.

It’s a defense mechanism designed for self-preservation in a life that is nasty, brutish and short. Living ain’t easy. People are fed-up with hard-sells and sledge-hammer pitches. They’re sick of hustlers always running game on them. Their walls grow stronger, reinforced by the plaster of bad experiences. Once they pigeon-hole you as a ’spammer/scammer’, it’s all over. Don’t bother with getting them to take out their wallets. Won’t happen.

There is a fool-proof way to get people to lower their defenses and commit. You just need to manage their impressions of you. You need to change what they think about what you’re doing. You’re not spamming, you’re offering a product that is designed to fulfill needs. You’re not a money-hungry marketer, you’re a passionate individual who loves to help people achieve their goals. Reframing and re-adjusting the prospect’s image of your brand.

So here it comes. Here’s the part when I tell you to ‘always add value’ and ‘build trust’. But let’s refashion this proverbial tip on selling. Let’s put a spin on value or trust and combine them into a single actionable guideline: Always focus on giving before trying to get.

Give them helpful free content. Give them answers to their questions. Give them a freebie. Point them to tools they need and things they should know. Give them tips they can instantly use in their lives/business. Give them pleasant surprises. Give them interaction. Give them promises you can keep. Develop a history of giving. Be known as a giver.

“This person has given me many valuable things. I have benefited from these gifts. I like her. I will pay attention to what she says. I think I will trust her words. I will lower my guard a little and run with it. What else could go wrong? I’ve only had good experiences with her so far. She has proven herself to be beneficial to me. I think I may…. no, I will commit and take a chance this time. It’ll be fine, I’m sure. Don’t worry too much.”

These are exactly the thoughts you want them to think. This is the inner dialog you want in their heads as they look at your proposition, as they wander and explore your website. This is how you get them to buy, subscribe, agree and take action on your suggestions.

Don’t mass spam your links all over the web and think that you’ll get someone’s trust or money easily. That’s a silly strategy. You’re not selling to robots or animals. You’re selling to people who care about the seller. Get what you want by first giving unconditionally. Manage what people think or feel about you and you’ll get what want easily.

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An Essential Marketing Principle: Give Before You Try to Get

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When combined with the already existing limit based on follow ratios, this means that it will be more difficult for marketers or self-promoters to rapidly increase their Twitter follower count by following many people. The old days of following thousands of users a day to get thousands of followers back are gone.

That’s not to say the strategy of mass following users to increase your Twitter followers doesn’t work anymore. It does. Why? Because many people use tools to auto-follow anyone who follows them. And there are new users who think its only polite to reciprocate. So you can easily get tens of thousands of followers from this strategy over time.

I see quite a few people still practicing this method. Some are social media enthusiasts or consultants, some are internet marketers or bloggers. All of them are people who want to get something in return. They want to:

1. Make money. The goal is to monetize Twitter users by linking and recommending products or services, either their own or others if they are an affiliate. They do this by tweeting out links and sending automated direct messages with the same offers when someone follows them back.




2. Improve their reputation. They amass followers with the aim of improving their reputation in a specific field like marketing or social media. They also use their followers to boost their prominence on other social arenas like Digg or Facebook.




3. Get more visitor traffic. More followers means more visitors to their websites so they can get more subscribers, readers and members. They also want the ability to make specific content go ‘viral’ and become popular by sharing it with their followers.

Many people think that to achieve all of the above, they need to build a large list of Twitter followers and broadcast links to get free traffic. It’s a simple strategy. The more followers you have, the more people listen to you, and the easier it is to spread your messages.

But do you really need a large number of followers to promote yourself successfully on Twitter? The answer is no. Not at all. But many people still persist in mass following users. Let’s look at some of the reasons why you don’t need to use this marketing tactic.

Low-Value Followers: Automatons, Spammers and Self-Promoters

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Many products on Twitter marketing have been released by internet marketers looking to profit from the growing interest in Twitter. These products give you the same blueprint: just get more twitter followers. All you need to do is to follow many users everyday, drop non-mutuals and then follow more. Repeat until you get a ton of followers and look like a social media rockstar. If people follow you, you must be awesome, right?

The only problem is that these are low-value followers. Not because they are dumb or socially inferior but because a good amount of these followers are not ultra-targeted, active or responsive. Many of them are self-promoters, spammers or automated feed accounts. These people aren’t interested in you. They don’t care about you. They didn’t REALLY opt-in. They even followed you automatically, didn’t they?

If we were to draw comparisons to a email list or newsletter, these types of people are the ones who would use a temporary email address to sign up so they can get your freebie and disappear. Most of them aren’t going to end up retweeting your stuff, most of them don’t even read your tweets. Most of them don’t give a damn about your ideas.

It’s not about the follower count, its about conversions. A carefully cultivated list of 1000 followers can beat a list of 10,000 twitter followers anytime when it comes to spreading content or getting traffic/sales. A social media strategy that only involves mass following all sorts of people and shooting out links in order to hook buyers or readers is quite inadequate.

Low-value followers are incredibly easy to get and the only positive thing about them is that they’ll make you look good. Judging influence by the follower count is something that people do. It’s social proof. So you have 80,000 followers. You can probably start a social media consulting business and tell everyone that you’re an expert. Or write that ebook and flaunt your follower count on the sales page. You can fool a lot of people and you’ll make money too.

So play the Twitter game of mass adding and dropping users for a few months. You may even meet some cool people but don’t assume that you have 50,000 users who actually read your tweets or are interested in you. They aren’t. And you’re irrelevant to them.

Remember, you’re not getting natural opt-in follows preempted by interest. All you have is an inflated number. Maybe you think that’s something to be proud of but if a 7 year old kid can press a auto-follow button and get 500 followers in 24 hrs, you’re not that impressive.

Twitter Marketing is More Than Just Getting Followers

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Unless you are a celebrity or a famous brand, you will never get hundreds of thousands of natural follows from people who are interested in what you have to say. If you want to look like a VIP, you can fake it by manipulating follower counts like most self-promoters.

But do you really think that’s effective Twitter marketing? Sometimes I feel that marketers should stop this obsession with volume and carefully think about cultivating a better follower list as well as other more effective ways of using Twitter for marketing.

I don’t want to blindly label all mass-following users as spammers. Some are not malicious nor are they aggressive self-promoters. I’m just questioning the overwhelming focus on this tactic, as if its the only way to accumulate influence or market yourself on Twitter. It’s not.

This isn’t an attack on anyone. If you think that mass following many users to boost your follower count is great, keep doing it. I’ve got no problems with that. I’m just offering my opinion on why I think its flawed. This comes from having actually experimented with this strategy, so it’s not just theoretical postulations.

In my opinion, while having a large number of Twitter followers is not a bad thing, there are some other key factors you should consider if you’re want to use Twitter to market yourself or your website/brand. These are points which I think are quite important even if your ONLY reason for using Twitter is to make money or get traffic.

The most important thing you should remember: It’s not about the number of Twitter followers you have, its about who follows you and the responsiveness of your audience.

Who Follows You: The People Who Give You Their Attention

It matters who reads your tweets. Are these people interested in you or your business? An interested follower is naturally more engaged with whatever you put out on Twitter. People who automatically follow you do not count as interested followers.

Are your followers active? Active users share your links, they give you feedback, they talk to you. Automated or semi-automated users are not active users that will interact with you.

And do the people who follow you have influence? Would you rather get 50 retweets from users with 10 to 100 random followers? Or you rather get 10 retweets from influencers  in same niche, with all of them having 1000 to 10,000 very relevant followers?

How about tweeting out a link or idea and having someone with a blog in the same niche write about it and link to you? Can your army of auto-followers offer the same? Not every Twitter user has the same audience size. Some users can reach more people much faster and these are the ones that can help you.

This is not to suggest that the average twitterer is useless but to highlight the unequal influence of each user. Who follows you matters a great deal because powerful Twitter marketing involves not just link-blasting but networking and relationship development.

Responsiveness of Your Audience: Are They Engaged?

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Responsiveness is the degree to which your Twitter audience is engaged with whatever messages you put out on Twitter. A responsive audience connects with you, retweeting your links and answering your questions. They interact with your Twitter stream.

When we talk about a responsive email list, we’re talking about subscribers who are willing to buy or take action on your offers. Responsive Twitter followers are similar: they take action on your tweets by spreading them or talking back to you.

An easy way to measure responsiveness is to ask a question and see how many people respond. The no. of link clicks and retweets are other factors as well but anyone can click on a random link: it just shows that they’re interested in the link title or story. But are they interested in you? Actual responses to your queries are a good measure of that.

A responsive Twitter audience naturally develops when people are interested in you, what you do and who you are. Celebrities have the most responsive followers, many of their subscribers even sign up for a Twitter account just to interact with their tweets. They’re actively looking forward to reading new tweets from their favorite personality. This anticipation and interest makes them a perfect audience for conversions and call-to-actions.

If you’re not already famous, you will have a tougher time building a responsive audience because you don’t get natural interest in you from the start. One way to generate this interest is to develop a reputation in your field so that your name or brand is known.

This means you shouldn’t just spend your whole day following/unfollowing, tweeting links and chit-chatting. You have to work at your brand away from Twitter. If you put out an interesting tool or piece of content, you’ll get interest. If you’re selling a product that solves a problem, you’ll get interest. As you become more known online, you will get people following you.

When on Twitter itself, you can develop responsiveness through reciprocation. By actively interacting with other users, you will induce them to pay more attention to your updates. But don’t just send out updates and only talk to people who reply to your tweets. Actively monitor and engage users. Over time they will warm up to you and responsiveness will increase.

Remember, you don’t just want a large follower count. You want a responsive group of followers. People who are genuinely interested in you and people who will click on your links, retweet you or respond to your queries. Ultimately this group of Twitter followers can help you popularize your website or grow your business.

My Follow Strategy for Twitter Marketing

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Instead of autofollowing a ton of people and rinsing them out to get mutual followers who are either not interested or very poorly interested in you, go for ultra-relevant Twitter users.

There are two types of twitter users you can target: people who have the power to help your business grow and the average user who is a potential customer. Whichever type you choose depends on your goals and what you want to get from Twitter.

Generally I’m more in favor in targeting twitter users who can best promote my business interests so you can get customers/buyers/readers through their efforts instead of your own. Potential end-users/customers are equally important although you’ll have a tougher time trying to determine their level of interest in your website/product.

Yes, you can use keywords to track tweets and find prospects on Twitter directories but interacting with each and every prospect (there are thousands out there) takes a lot of time and energy. I would prefer networking with influencers who can promote my site/brand in and outside of Twitter because they have a built-in audience and a platform.

Mass following can get you followers. But it doesn’t drastically improve your reputation, no matter how attractive a high follower count looks. A mass follower tweeting out a link is very different from an authority in the field endorsing a link by putting it in a tweet. The influencer is followed by a targeted list of other taste-makers.

The core of influence will spiral outwards based on the initial endorsement. This is more powerful than a link sent out to an auto-follow audience. Sure, you can easily get traffic but your tweets are not as effective as a voice that is respected by your target market.

So who should you network with? Not just end-users with your keyword in their bio. But bloggers, webmasters, publishers, journalists and business owners. People who work in your field and own web sites that can send you links and traffic. You can focus on networking with the superstars in your field but don’t ever forget about less famous people. This article by Brett Borders offers a good explanation of why you shouldn’t ignore the average Twitter user.

So in essence, you should use Twitter as a relationship building tool to extract benefits from a core group of influencers who are relevant to your business/website. Network actively with the right Twitter users, talk to them, spread their links, give them feedback, support their content. Be a participant in their Twitter experience.

If you do this long enough, you will eventually make them comfortable with helping you or promoting your stuff either on Twitter or away from it.

If someone talks to me very often on Twitter, shares my content or points me to good resources, I’m more than willing to retweet their stuff. Especially if its great content. I wouldn’t think twice about it. The desire to reciprocate is a very powerful instinct.

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And if you want to talk about ‘going viral’, just a few retweets from several users with responsive audiences and your link will get all the momentum it needs. You don’t need to build up an account with tens of thousands of users only to send your message out to people who aren’t even half-interested in your content.

You will gradually grow your business or website by getting more readers, clients or buyers through the help of that core group. And after you’ve achieved some success, people will naturally start to follow you on Twitter. And these are the best kinds of Twitter followers to have, people who opt-in because they are interested in you or your work.

Then you can concentrate on these new batch of followers and by interacting with them, turn them into people who will actively support your content or initiatives. Many of them might be site owners or bloggers as well so this is a great way to network and learn if you’re looking for some help to improve your core business offerings.

In terms of making money indirectly or directly through Twitter, I’ve realized that the no. of Twitter followers you have is not always proportional to the income you’ll make.

It’s not necessary to inflate your Twitter follow count through an automated game of mass following. But I understand why people do it. It’s the same old strategy used on Myspace, Facebook and pretty much any social site where people can ‘friend’ each other and capture attention. The mentality is go for maximum volume and hook the few that will listen.

You can go down that route if you want but I think you can easily achieve the same results and more by cultivating a high quality list of followers and networking smartly with the right people. Marketing on Twitter does not just involve getting as many followers as you can.

Think beyond that. If you want followers, you should get them to come to you. You don’t have to chase after them. It’s devastatingly easy once you learn how to leverage other users with established audiences and create bait that entices people to opt-in because of interest.

What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below or talk to me on Twitter!

Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users

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An advertisement swap or ad swap is simply an arrangement where you agree to put up someone else’s ad on your site or email newsletter in exchange for them doing the same.

The goal of an ad swap is mainly to get exposure for a specific purpose, such as selling products/services or improving awareness of your brand/site. This is different from a link exchange because you are not seeking to improve your search engine rank.

The link value doesn’t matter at all. What matters is getting visitors into your web site.

Four Pre-Requisites for a Successful Ad Swap

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For an ad swap to be successful and fair, there are four pre-requisites to be fulfilled:

1. Equal traffic and exposure: Both parties ought to have websites that receive a steady amount of visitors everyday, or an email list with a decent amount of subscribers. Otherwise, there is no meaning in setting up an ad swap in the first place. Ad swaps are most agreeable when both parties have an equivalent audience reach/traffic count.




2. Fair and Good Ad placement: Traffic flows more easily to you when your ad is displayed in a spot which is easily viewable and accessible by visitors. While site designs may differ, both parties should endeavor to exchange ads that are displayed in a similar fashion. A pop-under does not capture visitor attention in the same way as a site-wide banner, so seek to use equivalent ad formats too.




3. High Relevancy: In the best scenario, an ad swap should occur between websites in the same niche, as both parties would benefit from a trade in visitors with an already established interest on the same topic. But it is possible for trades to occur for sites in different niches. The essential point to remember is that your ad/message MUST be relevant to the page or site where it is placed and vice versa for your ad partner.




4. No Conflicting Purpose. If you’re a merchant selling a product or a firm offering a service, you should not do ad swaps with competitors (other merchants/firms in the same niche). However ad swaps can be done for joint promotion of a specific event or shared project. You also should not do an ad swap with a site that contradicts your brand’s ethos or image (e.g. PETA doing an ad swap with Kentucky Fried Chicken).

There is one more important factor and that’s networking. Webmasters and bloggers are often inundated with requests for link trades: they have a defensive barrier against requests from strangers. Unless your site has some reputation or authority in your niche, ad swaps usually need to be prefaced with an established relationship.

People are far more likely to do ad swaps after they become more comfortable with you, when they don’t see you as a leech but a potential benefit. So keep this in mind as well when you aim to fulfill the four other prerequisites.

Seek Quality Ad Partners, Don’t Settle For Anything Less

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You may be familiar with the traffic exchange networks of the past (and present), places where webmasters can go sign up, submit their site and browse through each other’s websites in order to earn viewing credits that can be converted into pageviews for their own site.

It’s all about trading incentivized glances in a merry-go-round of self-interest. You look at my site, I look at your site. Everyone is happy. And it goes on ad nauseam.

Even though these pageview-trading rings are called traffic exchanges, they aren’t useful because you don’t get truly targeted and interested viewers, people who click through to your site because they were honestly compelled by curiosity or desire, not because they want more hits to their own website.

I bring up the topic of the old-school traffic exchanges to emphasize the importance of having a quality ad swap. One should carefully select ad partners because you need to maximize your returns with a limited inventory: you only have that much ad space to trade.

Your goal is to get the best quality visitors from your ad. To achieve that, you must try to only trade with websites that have a quality audience. Don’t do ad swaps just because someone asked you to, it could end up being a waste of time and ad space.

You probably know how to find quality ad partners already, as you should be familiar with your niche. If not, find them by doing a Google search for your site’s keywords.

If you can’t set up a good ad exchange because your site doesn’t get enough traffic, try again after you’ve developed a greater audience. Or you can negotiate with more popular sites by reducing the display length for your ad against their ad, although even that may not work.

Types of Ad Swaps You Can Set Up

All ad swaps can be measured with tracking links and analytics so both parties can compare how many hits they received with the clicks they sent out. If you’re doing an ad swap with a friend or prefer a looser agreement, you can forgo click data and stats altogether. The choice is up to you. Here are some ad swap formats you can use.

• On-site Banners and Text Links. This includes banners of all sizes and text links on a site-wide basis or on specific webpages. Includes blog post promos.




• Email Newsletters. Involves inserting a mention of your ad partner’s website or product/offer. This can be accompanied by a personal endorsement or not.




• RSS Feed Ads. These are either text links or image banners placed within an RSS feed.

Some Extra Tips and Recommendations

One guideline I follow is to never send traffic to my homepage or any page that is unoptimized. A custom landing page must be created for each ad swap. I can design it for the purpose of capturing leads (freebie + opt-in) or set it up so that it becomes a welcome page (’Hello, visitors from Site A!’) with a short introduction and deep links.

I also pay special attention to the ad banners used. Banners that reference your partner’s site name or brand tend to get better click throughs, although you should get permission first. Sometimes they do not want to appear as if they were endorsing your site, although they are already implicitly doing so by having your ad up.

Ad Swaps Aren’t Hip Now But They Still Work

While it’s a common email marketing practice amongst internet marketers, I don’t often read about ad swaps being recommended as a traffic strategy for bloggers or webmasters. There were a few ad trading networks around but none of them really caught on for some reason.

Perhaps it sounds archaic and boring compared to all the super cool social media viral marketing buzz building tactics being promoted right now by all the experts. Yes, ad swaps may sound dull but they still work if you know how to do them right. If you’ve got ad space you can’t sell, why not give it a shot? You have nothing to lose at all. ^_^

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Ad Swaps: A Smart and Easy Way to Get Free Traffic

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There’s a common saying: build your site for visitors, not for search engines. A famous Google webmaster guideline asks the question: “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” It’s actually quite a challenge: Pretend search engines don’t exist. How can you grow your website, get visitors and make lots of money?

I recently built a couple of sites without any focus on search engine rankings and getting organic search traffic. I didn’t block the search bots from indexing the site but I optimized nothing. Didn’t focus on site link architecture, title tags, meta-descriptions, meta-keywords, link building, competitor analysis. Forget about search engine algorithms.

I also wasn’t interested in methods of search-based marketing like finding long tail phrases and placing them on article directories or social media properties in order for these pages to rank and send traffic to my site. That would have involved researching search keywords and competition, so I did nothing of that sort too.

Ultimately, you’re dealing with a situation where the convenience offered by search engines is non-existent. No quick answers to quick questions for everyone. So how are people going to find what they need? How are they going to find my site?

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Without search engines, people will do what they’ve been doing for thousands of years. They rely on each other. They rely on the community, on the collection of publications known within their geographic location or industry. They rely on word of mouth. And they also rely on getting information from common resources like a public square, library, forum or marketplace.

Go where people gather. There you will be heard. It sounds like rudimentary marketing but quite honestly, until I’ve tried ignoring search engines and focusing exclusively on gathering points, I didn’t realize how much actual marketing I was NOT doing.

There were far more forums, social networking sites, blogs than I ever imagined even for small niches. And then there are mega-sites like Youtube and Facebook. If I were to put a number to it, I would say I’m missing out on at least a few thousand visitors every day by NOT being active in these online communities. And that doesn’t include offline marketing.

This is a good amount of visitors who are likely to become supporters of your content, clients or buyers. And the truth is I’ve always made money much faster by going to them instead of waiting for them to come to me. It sure beats the usual plan of waiting for my site to get indexed, rank for longtail phrases and THEN hopefully convert into an ad click or sale.

Traffic from these sites can be as targeted as search engine visitors: many are looking for recommendations from peers or actively engaged in a specific activity that is relevant to my site. But unlike search visitors, they aren’t coming in blind into your website from a query.

They know more than your page name, url and meta-description. They know your avatar, they know your history of contributions. They have a rough idea of who you are. Your words are in their face before they even click over. You’ve already presold them by making yourself familiar.

Image Credit: assbach

The most common problem we face is the lack of time. Can we outsource something like forum, blog or social site marketing? Yes, of course. But use people who know what they’re doing or else you’ll be wasting your time. If you’re a one-person operation, it might not be good for your brand to have someone that’s not you out there, even if you have an excellent ghost.

But small businesses, big businesses and multi-author content sites? No problem.

In any case, the whole experience of marketing without search engines is educational. It forced me to go out and represent my brand. This is me, I own this website. Hello, here’s what I do. Take a look. Here’s why this will be interesting.. and so on.

Once again, nothing revolutionary but when you’re not depending on search engines, its a make-or-break situation. How can I not just get clicks but the most value out of each click? What web page should I link to, who should I target, what content angle to use etc.

It forced me to work and persuade on a social level you don’t really think about because you’re always focused on existing traffic/users or things that will improve a machine’s reading of your site’s worth. Then you realize the value in having a strong brand and reputation.

I would recommend that you try pretending that search engines don’t exist, even just for a week or so. Especially if you’ve got a new website. Search engine traffic is invaluable but there’s a lot of visitors out there just waiting for you to show them your site. 

If you’ve already reached a plateau in organic search traffic and its not making you as much money as you like, why not focus on promoting your site outside of search engines?

So, how would you market your website if search engines didn’t exist?

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Marketing Your Website Without Search Engines

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A presell strategy can built upon months or years of contact with prospects: people are more likely to like or trust you when they’ve been reading or interacting with your blog or email newsletter. But a history of prior contact with prospects is not essential for effective preselling. One can pre-sell just as well when you have a reputation as an expert in a specific field.

A big part of pre-selling is how you present information in a way that subdues doubt, while placing prospects in a mental state that is ready to buy at your call-to-action.

As the vendor’s website usually includes all the features and specifications of the product, the job of pre-selling goes beyond simply duplicating what is already available. You should try to offer complementary or first-hand information on the product, this can be done in the form of a simple review or product comparison.

As an affiliate marketer or product owner, you’re often trying to make money by promoting someone else’s product or selling your own merchandise. Both marketer and vendor use similar tactics: The vendor creates a sales page flaunting all the benefits of the product, while getting targeted traffic through various means, the use of affiliates being one of them.

There’s usually some preselling involved: Both the affiliate and product owner often warm up the prospect through their email lists. Instead of sending visitors directly to the salespage, some affiliates prefer to presell by first getting traffic to their reviews of the product before sending them to buy at the vendor’s site.

But there’s an even more powerful way of preselling a product. This method allows you to easily dispel any buyer hesitation even if you do not have a long-standing relationship with your prospect or the reputation of an expert, although having both elements can boost your success rate even more.

This particular method has worked tremendously well for me. My conversions have improved dramatically by using it, instead of the usual presell review or a basic list recommendation. Interested in learning how it can work for you? Let’s look at it in detail.

Creating the Presell Blueprint and Learning How to Sell Indirectly

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This presell tactic is simple and can be explained easily. All you need to do is to try to sell to your target market indirectly by promoting a method which uses the product.

People are far more likely to purchase something when they can use it immediately to achieve a desired result. They don’t want to get a product and then struggle to find some way to get value out of it. Give them the blueprint to achieve their goals and they’ll gladly buy the product so they can put what they’ve learned into practice.

After all, most products are not ends in themselves, they are developed as means to acquire specific benefits. A weight loss ebook gives one the knowledge to get slimmer. A website template does nothing until it is customized and used for a specific purpose.

Here’s a detailed example of what to do. Let’s suppose you’re in the ‘make money online’ niche. As an affiliate or vendor, you’re trying to promote a keyword tool that helps people find search terms to target niche markets online. You want people to buy this tool from you (if you’re the vendor) or through your referral link (if you’re the affiliate).

So what do you do? Instead of just doing a review of the product, focus on creating and promoting a method that offers step by step instructions on making a lot of money online. Because that’s what people really want. They don’t want a fancy looking keyword tool. They want to make money online, buy the things they love and pay off all their bills.

The keyword tool is just something that gets them there. So do up a short report called something like “The Secret of Passive Income: 10 Foolproof Ways to Make $1000 a Day.” I know it sounds really tacky but something like this attracts attention instantly. If your content is good, don’t worry about the headlines sounding scammy.

The report can be in the form of a PDF ebook, an autoresponder course or even a series of blog posts, if you’re more comfortable with that. In this report you’ll offer some detailed tips on ways to make money online. No fluff or abstract theory. Just actionable steps and solid information. A key point to remember: Always structure your content around the product.

In this scenario, start by including a section on researching niche markets and demonstrate how it can be done with the product you’re promoting, which is the keywood tool.

Offer tips on some other market research methods or even free keyword tools, but make sure that you’re showing how your product can be used and how it is superior to others. 

You don’t have to just stop at one product: you can even squeeze in and promote a few more by aligning certain parts of your report towards each product’s capability/promise. For example, you could recommend an ebook about article marketing after you’ve finished offering tips on the topic. Or a link cloaker/tracking plugin when talking about creating affiliate links.

Never let the method degenerate into a sales pitch. Remember, you’re selling the method to sell the product. Don’t push too hard. Don’t skimp on helpful tips. Demonstrate value. The readers will be grateful. They will develop trust. Because you are helping them.

This is How You Presell to the Masses

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Put a salespage for a keyword tool side by side with a substantial free report on how to make $1000 a day. Which is going to reach more people? Which is more tempting? Beginners and experts… you’ll hook them all with the free report on making money. How about the keyword tool? Just a group of marketers who know what they’re doing and what they need.

The method sells itself. Nothing compares to it. What do you think will spread faster? The promise of a better life and reliable daily income… or a keyword tool that may even look alien to someone who is new to internet marketing.

The method has natural appeal. Not all products do. No matter how much you dress up the sales page with pretty words, its not going to trump a free lesson plan where everything is in place and ready to go. If your content is built around the product, there is a high chance that readers will purchase it because they see how it can help them achieve their goals.

They’re not going to give up so easily once they’ve seen the light, once they know what to do. When they know that certain products will help them succeed, they’ll be more than willing to pay in order to remove the obstacle. All this because your blueprint gave them a sense of direction while stirring up their desires.

This presell tactic is extremely powerful. I have used it and found great success in multiple niches, both as an affiliate and product owner. This is by far my favorite method of pre-selling and I think it works better than a simple trust-based recommendation in an email list or the usual try-to-be-objective-and-add-value review.

Show your prospects a clear path by removing everything in the way and they’ll follow. To sum up in a sentence: Teach people how to fish and they’ll buy the fishing rod from you.

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The Most Powerful Way to Presell Any Product or Service

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Many webmasters or bloggers are infatuated with dofollow blogs. Not everyone is obsessed with them, but there are many who spend time or money trying to leave keyword comments on dofollow blogs, in order to improve their website’s search engine rankings.

They sell tools to find these dofollow blogs, they build apps to auto-fill blogs with pre-prepared generic comments. Some enterprising individuals offer blog commenting services: you can buy hundreds of dofollow comments left on blogs with your choice of keyword anchor text.

It is one of the easiest ways to get your link up on a webpage but this mass fetish with dofollow links conditions webmasters or marketers into thinking that blog comments should only be used for the sole purpose of getting immediate benefits like backlinks.

“Well, a link is a link. It’s better than nothing.” So they think to themselves at the end of an hour spent clicking on the auto-fill button and paraphrasing articles to make comments look ‘natural’. Don’t want to trip the spam filter now, do we?

Everything is streamlined towards one goal, to get that keyword link up. The bulk of one’s efforts are spent running some crappy do-follow search tool so one can go over and ejaculate comments on hundreds of blogs, discarding most of them once the deed is done.

Such promiscuity. And perhaps, such a waste of time and money. Why? Because these dofollow comments are junk compared to a high quality link recommendation within a relevant blog post. A blog post providing exposure that may result in a snowball of more citation links.

To be fair, the tactic of using dofollow blog comments as a link building tool is not entirely useless. They can direct some juice to websites you don’t care about, the ones you don’t intend to develop as a reputable brand. Basically, adsense or affiliate sites where you just want visitors to go in and come out via your referral link or ad click.

But even in these and other scenarios, blog comments can do more than just give you a few easy links. After all if your goal is to rank well in search engines, you should be pursuing a method that gives you a higher returns on investment. And such a method exists.

But to achieve that, you need to first do two things:

1. Abandon the obsession with dofollow comments. Focus on all blogs equally even if they have ‘nofollow’ turned on and don’t directly influence your rank. Blogs you comment on should only be selected based on factors such as their relevance and audience size.




2. Use blog comments as a first step to get more. Comments should be a preliminary and foundational step in an overall link + traffic building strategy. They are part of an overall plan to extract more valuable links from selected targets in the long run.

I used to think that in order to build links to my new niche site, I should just go find dofollow blogs and comment spam them. That’s all they were good for. After I gained some experience in site building and marketing, I eventually dropped this myopic focus on link building. I realized that there’s a much better way to use blog comments.

I’m not even talking about warm and fuzzy stuff like ’contributing to the discussion‘ or sharing knowledge, even though that’s a nice thing to do. I’m talking about a better way to use comments to get long term links that are better than dozens of dofollow blog comments.

You must be wondering: is there really more to blog commenting as a link building method?

The answer is yes. Having been a newbie before and gone down this path, I will offer some useful advice: If you only see blog commenting as a way to get instant links, you’re not maximizing their full potential. You are missing out on a lot of good stuff.

From my point of view, comments should be used holistically within a masterplan for getting what you really need: direct link recommendations from bloggers or site owners with a loyal audience, sending you high quality visitors that will convert well.

That’s the jackpot to aim for. That’s the ultimate goal. Not a bunch of approved comments with your precious keywords on a hundred semi-irrelevant blogs. Or even a thousand.

I’m not going to leave you high and dry. Next week, I will give you the exact comment strategy I use to build new sites into reputable authorities in their niche.

You’ll learn how to integrate blog commenting into a marketing strategy that gives you quality links and traffic. If you don’t want to miss that, consider subscribing to dosh dosh.

So what do YOU think about using dofollow blogs as a link building method? Do you do it and how well does it work for you?

P.S. Please don’t pitch any dofollow products, blog lists, commenter tools or search engines in the comments below. As you can tell, I’m trying to de-emphasize link building/spamming via dofollow blogs. Just a note for those who love to drop links without reading the post. ( ^ _ ^)

The Unhealthy Obsession With DoFollow Blog Links

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But they’re not just ‘money’ because they bring in revenue: they are one of the easiest ways to grow your audience without much work. If you learn how to optimize these money pages (its not hard to do), you’ll really improve your website in so many ways. More revenue, more members, more influence and authority. Doesn’t that sound good?

I’ve talked very briefly about money pages in my previous post on analyzing your site visitors and decided to expand a little more on this topic because I think its often overlooked by webmasters. We’re always focused on creating new content and getting new visitors to these new pages that we forget about what’s going on in other parts of our website.

This is tailored towards content publishers and bloggers but the main strategies here apply to other site types as well, you just need to find the right tools to do it. So lets get started.

How to Optimize Your Money Pages

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There are many things you can do to money pages, in order to make them better or more profitable. It’s important to decide the extent of your work according to your goals and resources. How much time do you want to spend and what’s most important to you? Do you want a bigger readership? Or are you just concerned with increasing your daily revenue?

Here are a list of things you can do for your money pages:

1. Monetize. The aim here is to get more revenue out of each page. There are various ways to achieve this and they generally involve the placement of ads both around and within content. There is also an indirect future revenue from lead capturing.
2. Capture Leads. The money page is optimized to encourage a visitor to subscribe to your mailing list, site feed or register for your website. The main aim is to find a way to continue to reach your visitors after they leave your money page. This helps to grow your site audience and is also a component of revenue generation.
3. Improve Relevance. This involves revamping the money page in order to provide up-to-date information or better content in order to accommodate visitor needs. This provides  an improved user experience for all and can result a host of benefits like more referral/citation links and greater visitor loyalty/trust. Relevance is also important when your main goal is to capture leads or increase revenue.
4. Make it Rank Better.  Doing on-site and off-site optmization will help specific money pages to rank better on the search engine result pages, hence driving more traffic back to your site. This increases your site reach and revenue at the same time.

Step 1: Find Your Money Pages

Image Credit: TW Collins

Open up the web analytics program you’re using for your website. There should be a section which reveals which pages have the highest unique views per month. Extract the urls for the top 10 pages and put them somewhere for easy access. Or bookmark them on your browser. If you don’t currently use an analytics tool, I recommend setting up Google Analytics.

How many pages you choose to optimize really depends on your website and preference. If you have a lot of webpages that get solid traffic, you can do more. If you don’t have many pages that get web traffic, then you have a lesser amount to work with. I like to focus on the top 10 because if its a manageable amount of work for an acceptable returns on investment.

My personal guideline is to only work on pages with a minimum of 200 unique views everyday. It’s a basic number that’s good for some decent conversions. Adjust this figure to something you can work with, if your website is new or gets less overall traffic.

The point to remember is that not every page is hot. The goal is not to optimize every single web page you have. There has to be a limit. So learn to prioritize and work only on the pages that are currently receiving the most traffic to your website.

Step 2: Improving Content Relevance

Image Credit: jesse.millan

Visitor search queries reveal what people are looking for and what they want to get from your web page. It tells you what information they expect and is a way to understand their desires or needs. Many are ready to pay for a solution or subscribe to get knowledge in their inbox.

Better relevance = better conversions. It’s that simple. By making your website as relevant as possible to search queries, you’re making visitors more likely to stick around, opt-in or buy. Users are going to click away if they find that your web page doesn’t fulfill their info needs. So the first step is closely examine your money pages in relation to search traffic terms.

My goal is to include every search query in my money page. Every question typed into search engines by visitors who access my site must be answered. One very easy and quick way to do this is to add a simple FAQ to the page to address the visitor’s specific needs. Just phrase the same exact search query as a question. Then write an answer which responds to it.

Another method for search query relevance is to create new content and insert it into the money page. It’s important to edit your pages so that it doesn’t display content that is simply outdated or useless. You’re not going to presell anyone with stuff like that. It won’t work.

Either rewrite the entire money page or include update notes specifying new information and linking to other pages on your website with newer content. Whenever new information or changes occur, go back into the money page to make necessary adjustments. This is one reason why I asked you to keep those 10 URLs bookmarked or easily accessible.

Note that by increasing your money page’s relevance and informational value, you are also increasing its linkability: People are more likely to link to it because it is a detailed and useful reference page on the topic. Whenever possible, I try to fashion my money pages on blogs after Wikipedia in terms of comprehensiveness.

Step 3: Monetizing Your Money Page

Image Credit: Gaetan Lee

While you can monetize your money page and capture leads at the same time, I find it better to optimize for one goal instead of trying to achieve both. Because when it comes to monetization, captured leads are usually a good source for long term income anyway.

There are formats for each goal (monetize or lead capture) and you’ll get better results if you either choose to monetize fully or go all out to hook your visitors by making them sign up or subscribe to your website. If you put up too many well blended ads, the visitor can easily click away instead of subscribing to your newsletter, so either pick one goal or balance both.

Let’s talk about monetization first. This is easy if you’re using ad networks like Google Adsense. Go to your money page and insert an additional ad unit, blend it well with your content and make sure that its quite visible while not being too obtrusive.

A well placed Adsense unit can really increase your overall daily income. I’ve seen a jump of more than $20 a day for a site that I own when I took the time to test and optimize a few money pages. While you may have default ads already on every page of your site (sidebars, header etc), these may not be truly optimized for a money page.

Money pages need to be treated differently from the other pages on your website. They’re the ones that bring a lot of visitors (big sample size) so you can really use this opportunity to test the profitability of specific ad schemes. You can even remove the default ads specifically for this page so you have more room to experiment. That’s what I do for some sites.

Other ways to monetize include the use of commission-based affiliate programs which range from digital products to established eCommerce retailers like Amazon.com. Clickbank is a digital product marketplace you can use. Sign up, search through the marketplace for a product, grab your affiliate link, insert it on your money page.

You can also try CPA networks with relevant pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale programs. Commonly used CPA networks are Market Leverage, Max Bounty, NeverBlue, PepperJam, Copeac, Azoogle and Hydra Network, among many others. Affiliate programs can work well but remember to keep them related to your content.

Alternatively, you can promote your own products on your money page by including a short pitch for it and linking to a proper sales page. Or you can try to sell your visitors away from the money page by getting them to first subscribe to an email list. This brings us to the next step.

Step 4: Optimizing to Capture Leads

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The goal is to capture not just the email of the visitor but his/her permission to allow you to reach them away from your website. For some of you, you want visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed so they’ll continue to read your content or hopefully participate on your site.

Many set up email lists and auto-responders with the aim of eventually monetizing by selling their own products or recommending those of JV partners. Their aim here is to get users to opt-in to receive newsletters or special offers. The same goes for online retail stores.

Good email marketing providers are Aweber and GetResponse, both of which charge a monthly fee that you should be able to earn back easily. There are free alternatives available but you’ll often lose out in terms of features. If this doesn’t bother you, you could try starting with any of the free email software or plugins available.

To optimize a money page to capture leads, you’ll need to do some offer customization. Look at what content/product is on the page and create a specific offer that’s relevant to it. Provide an incentive for someone to sign up: perhaps a free digital product with related or more in-depth information. Or simply the promise of future discounts or special product offers.

To get into the mind of the visitor and understand what entices them, you’ll need to go back to the search queries you’re getting. If someone is interested in ‘what causes wrinkles’, you’ll know they’ll be interested in an ebook on natural anti-aging remedies. Do up a free guide and offer it to them only if they register as a member or sign up to your email list.

How about lead capture for communities and membership sites? Apart from providing incentives you can use teasers. Restrict visitor actions by only allowing them to view a limited amount of content or interact in a limited fashion. This limit will be removed when a user registers with your community. These are methods commonly practiced by paid membership sites, forums and social media sites to entice signups.

Step 5: Sending Internal Traffic to Your Money Pages

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Now that you’ve optimized your money pages for maximum conversions, you can also send over visitors from other pages of your site. You’ve already done the work to make the pages incredibly relevant and usable, they shouldn’t just be seen by search engine visitors.

If your money pages are related, by sure to interlink each one so that each visitor is funneled to another optimized page. This not only improves your bounce rate but makes sure that each visitor is given two opportunities to convert if they aren’t persuaded the first time around.

Another method is to use a script to autolink specific anchor keywords or phrases on your entire site to the specific web page. This helps with SEO and is very easy way to get more eyes on your money page. If you’re using Wordpress, try the Internal Link Building plugin or the SEO Smart Links plugin. Both help to auto-link keywords on every page of your blog. There are quite a few similar plugins out there but these two work well for me.

If you’re a blogger producing content daily, endeavor to link to the money pages whenever it’s pertinent to your post because you’re driving traffic to pages that will perform well. Alternate the links to each money page so your audience won’t get sick of seeing them all the time.

There is an alternative way to highlight your money pages: Group the ones about a similar topic together and list them all in a reference page, which will funnel traffic out to different locations. Instead of linking to each individual money page, you can just link or promote the reference page, which will then direct the visitors you get to each money page simultaneously.

A simple example of this is my reference page on social media marketing, which collects both money pages and less visited pages together under a specific theme. There’s also the option of creating special banner ads or images to link to either your money page or the reference page, it doesn’t always have to be promoted in the form of a link within content.

Step 6: Improving Your Search Engine Ranking

This is the final step in the process and should always come after you’ve optimized your money pages for maximum results and set up a method to promote it internally on your site. After you’ve done all that, it’s time to look at boosting a major factor for earning more money: your website’s ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This is an optional step because if you’re getting a lot of visitors, you’re should already be ranking quite well. But if you’re on the second page of Google or not yet in the top 3 queries for a keyword/phrase that is sending you a good amount of traffic, why not bump it up and get even more visitors per day?

You’ve already got your list of top money pages based on search queries. Now you should find what these pages are ranking for, which is something you can easily discover through your stats trackers. If you’re already using it,  Google Webmaster Central is a free tool that shows you the top 20 search queries visitors use to reach your site.

Off-Site Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a pretty big topic: its hard to cover everything that needs to be done so I’m going to simplify it into one fool proof method of improving your search engine rank for Google. This is something that is unanimously agreed upon by everyone.

All you need to do is get links from other sites, especially with the specific anchor text you are trying to rank for. But not just from anywhere. You want links from quality, relevant websites.

Let’s see what Google itself says about ranking:

Sites’ positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

One more. From Google’s warning on link schemes:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

Links matter a lot because Google’s algorithm is set up to use the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. High quality links boost the trust, relevance and authority of your web page. This is somewhat the same for search engines like Yahoo or Live.

Ideally, the best type of links you can get are from the websites that are already ranking well for the keyword or phrase you are targeting. But these links might not be easy to acquire, since you’re likely to be viewed as a competitor and a threat.

So, what I personally like to do is to do some research on the people ranking for your keyword/phrase on the first two pages. Dig into their backinks by using something like Yahoo Site Explorer and find out who is linking to them. Try to get those same links if possible and even more quality links that your competitors don’t have.

There are many ways to build links, some are blackhat and others are more compliant with search engine guidelines. As I’ve mentioned in my previous post on long term social media marketing, I favor the strategy of creating valuable services, tools and content in order to attract links from bloggers. It’s stable and works extremely well for every niche out there.

If your money page is optimized for relevance and is high on informational value, it is already a potential link magnet. So here’s something you can do immediately. Send email pitches about your money page to relevant blogs. If you contact 1,000 blogs, you might easily get 50 to 100 extra links (or more), which may be enough for you to outrank other websites. Sometimes all you need to do is to get the word out.

And there are many other ways. Article directories. Blog/web directories. Social bookmarking websites. Social news sites. Social media communities (Flickr, Youtube etc). Contests. Link exchanges. Blog comments and carnivals. Donations/sponsorships. Forums. Press Releases.

On-Site Search Engine Optimization

Image Credit: Mario de Leo

On top on link building, another aspect of ranking better is on-site search optimization, whereby you make your webpage compatible with search engine requirements and the specific search query you’re targeting. Google’s webmaster guidelines, Yahoo’s Webmaster Resources and Live Search’s Webmaster Center has a list of the most basic stuff you should be doing and ways for you to track your site in their search engines.

Basic pointers for on-site optimization involves having a good site architecture, where pages with similar themes are grouped together with a focus on great navigation and usability for visitors. On site-optimization also involves having your targeted keywords in the title tags and an appealing meta-description, which may affect SERP clickthrough rates. For the WP users out there, you might find this excellent guide to Wordpress SEO useful.

Other on-site factors include keyword density, which is the number of times a keyword appears compared to the total number of words in a page. And latent semantic indexing (LSI), which examines a page in relation to groups of associated words/terms used within it.

I wouldn’t worry too much about latent semantic indexing and perhaps even keyword density because a content heavy page is likely to include the associated terms and keywords naturally, because of its depth. The main point to note is to maintain a tight focus on your chosen topic and not divert too much from it in your content.

And then there’s the controversial topic of PageRank Sculpting: using the nofollow tag on internal site links to optimize the strength of specific pages, thereby enabling them to rank better in search engines. Perhaps a useful tactic, although one that isn’t quite necessary. Any possible success here partly depends on how knowledgeable you are with SEO.

On-site optimization isn’t a difficult process, as long as you have a good site architecture set up from the start and follow search-engine guidelines. The hard part is really the task of getting people with relevant/quality websites to link to your money pages.

Time for You to Do Some Work…

These are the fundamental factors involved in optimizing your money pages. After completing the first step of finding your money pages, you don’t need to work on the other steps in a sequence. As I’ve said earlier, it depends on your goals. Personally, I go through all six steps when I’m looking at money pages that receive a substantial amount of daily web traffic.

The good thing about money pages is that once you optimize them, you can just leave them alone for a while. If you’re busy every day, you might want to spend an hour during the weekend on your money pages. Or just assign them to a colleague or a member of your staff. Set aside some time to optimize them and you’ll definitely see the results.

If you found this article useful in any way, please consider linking to it or sharing it with others. I’ll love to hear your comments as well!

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6 Fool-Proof Steps to Make More Money With Your Website

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If you think about it, call-to-actions are really a natural result of most human interactions. You call a friend to chit-chat and before you hang up, you ask her to have lunch together tomorrow. She thinks about her schedule for a moment and says “Sure, let’s do that”.

It’s just a way to conclude a moment of interaction. It’s telling the other party ‘what’s next’ and how to continue. If used alongside exceptional content, the call to action no longer becomes a gentle request but an imperative that requires your immediate commitment.

I often feel that way when I’m reading well written brochures from charity organizations. And it works the same way (sadly) for get-rich-quick scams that prey on the human desire for happiness, of which wealth is widely seen as the best means. If the message is overwhelming enough, people will generally do whatever it is you want them to do.

Even in day to day interactions, people react to call to actions that are coherent with what they are currently feeling or thinking. It flows on from an initial encounter: Here is how you can get even more of the same. Here is how you can continue down the path of success. Here is how you can share your love (or hate) for this brand.

We have a predilection for sharing information: We often tell people about our good or bad experiences with products or places, sometimes even if no one asks for our opinion. If you want someone to spread the word about your content or service, ask them directly. They will do it even if you don’t give them an incentive. This is what I believe from experience.

Modesty and pride are usually the main obstacles. You don’t want to come off as too conceited and you’re too proud to beg. So you publish free content and give away free tools without asking for anything in return. Maybe its just a hobby for you and you don’t care. That’s cool. But if you’re interested in reputation or revenue, this won’t help you at all.

There’s Nothing Wrong With Asking for Help

I’ve been using Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu, a Wordpress plugin that arranges the current admin area menus in a horizontal, instead of a vertical format. This is a great feature that helps me work faster and better with Wordpress websites.

In the settings menu for this plugin, you’ll find a series of call to actions:

People have a few options of what to do after installing and using the plugin. Two of them involves increasing its social proof (rating and sharing the plugin) and one is a revenue generator (donations). Generally, people are more willing to part with compliments (free) than money (cost involved) so I would imagine that most would pick the first two options.

The plugin has a perfect 5 star score (with 316 ratings) at the Wordpress plugin directory, which as some will know, is a rare feat for any plugin that has over 100 ratings. Impressive stuff, although part of its success is also due to the simplicity of the plugin itself.

This is a free tool. Some would have just installed it and forgot about sharing if they were not prompted to do so. We have things on our mind, goals to fulfill, people to meet and jobs to do. Call to actions break through the clutter and say ‘do this now’. Don’t let your prospect’s interest or satisfaction fade beneath the noise of other things that demand their attention.

If you give away free content, you should not only ask why you are doing so but learn to embed call to actions in some of them. Don’t be too modest or proud to tell someone what you want them to do for you. And never underestimate the power of reciprocity. It’s an influential social norm that you can use to your advantage when marketing online.

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Tell People What You Want Them to Do for You

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In terms of online marketing, social media channels offer many opportunities. Some webmasters focus on setting up profiles with self-serving user generated content only for backlinks and traffic. Other savvy brands or individuals actively interact with online communities while moderating the impulse to ’spam’, in order to build legitimacy, authority and a better reputation in the specific field.

And then there are a few that adopt a particularly powerful social media marketing strategy that consistently extracts attention with ease. A way that reaches out to every new and future member of a social community automatically with minimal effort. A tactic that markets continuously as long as the social channel exists and grows, without end or interruption.

Introducing the Method

Image Credit: Mick Ø

You might have heard about Dell earning $1 million in revenue from posting product offers on their Twitter account. So they’re using Twitter like email, as a sales alert system. Not a big deal really. But they’ve also recently started posting exclusive ‘Twitter-only’ discount offers on their Twitter profile (Over 100K followers!). Exclusive to Twitter. Those are the magic words. Exclusive to Myspace users. Exclusive to Bebo users. Exclusives, exclusives.

When a social media channel (like Twitter) becomes large enough, it’s time to think about devoting serious attention to leveraging the size and reach of the userbase. Marketing doesn’t need to only target the lucky demographic you manage to data-mine and filter out from the online crowd. Sure, its more ‘targeted’ but why limit yourself to just that? Why not reach everyone and let the interested few fall through the net themselves? Move the masses. Not just the few. No market segmentation needed. No need to selectively pitch and sell.

Exclusive product or service offers for users of a specific social website are only the beginning. There are a lot more ways to deeply tap into and gain the favor of large social communities. But first of all you’ll need to understand the mentality of social media users. People will consciously or subconsciously self-identify as members of a particular online social tribe. “I’m a Digg user. I’m a Facebook junkie. I love being a Youtuber.”

Put aside your demographic notions of gender, age and location for a moment. People are more than all that when they are online. They create identities, behavioral patterns and personas based on the community they most frequently use. This constructed online identity is a proxy that can be used to not only engage these users but develop a favorable impression of your brand. Tap into their love or hate for the service and reach from there.

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A powerful social media marketing strategy is to create a service, tool, system which perfectly complements, faciliates and improves each individual users experience of the specific social website. Think of the features that unite them and the problems that frustrate them. This creation must be almost indispensable and extremely useful to a very broad audience. They must be able to pick it up easily and integrate it into their daily routine.

It must be highly customizable and relevant to the different ways one can participate in the social community. A powerful long-term strategy would be to invest time and money on creating free complementary services for large and growing online social communities. Each new or future user is drawn towards to your tools naturally because they help them to better enjoy the social channel. They will gravitate towards you and pull other users along.

The Twitter Example

I’ll use Twitter to illustrate my point again but note that what is said here applies to most social media communities. Twitter is not exceptional in this regard. All large social media communities online operate in a similar manner: they all have devoted users who love ways to improve their experience of the community or service.

Many popular blogs (like Mashable) and other websites have a huge Twitter fetish. Whenever a new and interesting app/service is released, they’ll write about it immediately. Twitter users will often tweet and retweet a new app because its relevant or interesting to them. So what’s the end result when you create an exceptional tool for Twitter users?

A large influx of traffic and links that’ll flow towards your service’s webpage, which can easily to funneled to your Twitter profile, other websites and business. The large influx of new users is continually exposed to your brand (indirectly via the service). You’re essentially appealing to a guaranteed audience that’ll always be there.

If your tool/service appeals to a broad enough market, it’ll develop a userbase. Work at it and soon enough it’ll grow itself. People will recommend it to friends, new users and the general public even withou any direct incentives from your end. Why? Because it is genuinely helpful. There is minimal trace of self-serving marketing and little effort or cost at your end to continually leverage a community that is all too willing to promote you.

Reaching the Peak of this Marketing Strategy

When someone asks for a good non-mobile way of using Twitter, the names of popular desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl often come up. They are considered essential tools for a better user experience. They are near the peak of our social media marketing strategy.

The pinnacle is reached when your service achieves great recognition and mindshare within the community. At this point you can easily expect an endless flow of user recommendations, backlinks, referral traffic and support from a community interested in evangelizing their favorite social media channel and inadvertently, the value of your brand.

This may even lead to the specific social media channel directly recommending your service as a worthy addon to what they offer. For instance, Twitter is very explicit about what third-party tools it endorses: the Apps page feature Twhirl/Tweetdeck amongst other tools and its one of the first few pages that is pushed to a new user when he/she signs up.

Even if you do not reach this level of achievement for a single service, you can create many diverse services to fulfill different needs. Don’t release them all at once. Spread them out and launch over a certain timespan so links and traffic can stream in consistently from blogs that monitor news about the social website. Be sure to interlink and promote your previous tools/services. This is another way of gaining attention and building influence over time.

Alternatively, you can sponsor and fund creative web developers who have a knack for creating addons for the specific social community. You don’t always have to build them yourself, you just need to strongly associate them with your brand.

Publicity is Giving Someone a Reason to Talk about You

Image Credit: speech bubble

Why would a popular tech industry blog like Techcrunch write about an unknown web designer in Toronto? Or a freelance writer in Tokyo? Because these two people did something interesting. Something relevant to Techcrunch’s blog and topic focus. Publicity is easy to get when your target is content-hungry publishers in a news cycle that loves novelty.

Many people encounter problems marketing online. You can’t get mentioned in a popular blog that sends a lot of visitors. Because you’re not relevant. So the solution is simple: make yourself compatible via an action, association or proxy. Build/do something that people in a specific field will talk about. The social media marketing strategy we are talking about is a publicity funnel. It gives you attention you can redirect to grow your core business or brand.

In the long run, you always should aim to build excellent authority services that grab a big chunk of user mindshare but should you fail in that aspect, there are short term advantages to using this marketing strategy. It can be a cyclical tactic to leverage news publishers for free traffic. Build a system, launch and promote. Grow users. Update with new features, send out news alerts. Build another service, launch and promote. Interlink systems, cross-promote. Grow users. Update features. It’s a way to get free traffic and links over and over again.

It’s kinda like linkbait on a mullet page but this is a lot more effective. You don’t just become a flavor of the day on Digg but an actual service with registered users. Attention isn’t given to you for the duration of a funny article but everyday when someone returns to re-use your service. Over time, user loyalty can develop into hardcore evangelism.

Monetization Won’t Be a Problem When You Command Attention

In general, monetization comes easy if you’re willing to work hard to develop your service’s reputation and value amongst the community of social media users. Remember Ashley Qualls? She’s a 18 year old high school dropout who created a website for Myspace layouts early on.

Most new Myspace users want to customize their layouts so layout providers were in hot demand. Her popular website was widely embraced by the community and it made $70K and more in revenue every month (back in 2007). While Facebook’s popularity has eclipsed MySpace, there’s still a guaranteed user audience for established providers like Ashley.

There’s always a way to make money when you have people flowing into your site on a daily basis via the proxy that you’ve set up for a particular social media channel. In the end, what you’ve created is another notch in your resume and can be used in many ways to demonstrate competence or expertise. Apart from monetizing via display ads or premium service plans, you can heavily promote your core business or offer B2B consultancy programs.

But don’t spend all your money and time only creating hit-or-miss services. When it comes down to it, a strategy like this must only be an add-on to your core business model or income system. Until it becomes a massive success, never mistake the means for the end.

What Social Media Sites Should You Target?

This particular method works best with very large and well known social media communities because you’re relying on their popularity and the size of the userbase to get attention. If you’re unfamiliar with what’s hot nowadays, the Alexa Top 500 gives a rough listing of the heavily trafficked social media sites both globally and in each country.

Focus on them but always keep an eye on other growing social communities. Read sites that report on new startups and be in the loop for news about specific social sites, especially the ones that appear to be growing fast. The key is to look out for problems faced by users, while enhancing features which are the main draw of the specific social service.

Keep trust-worthy programmers/coders and designers close by so you can materialize ideas as fast as possible. It also helps to be an active user in the specific social media community so you can develop an instinctive understanding of its architecture, usability and possibilities.

Sounds like a Lot of Effort Doesn’t it? But it Works.

If you’re feeling tired just by reading this article, this tactic is probably not for you. If you’re really excited (with wheels turning in your head), you’re on the right track to success. There has to be some enthusiasm for you to see this method through. And one last important tip: always build relationships with key influencers, way before you begin to pitch. Trust me, it helps a lot.

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Building Complementary Services: A Powerful Long-Term Social Media Marketing Strategy

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A little vagueness won’t hurt. I can always muddle through and change things up in response to market conditions or personal interest. No need to be perfect from the start.

I looked at many websites to study their methods, to learn what made them a success. I started planning what specific niche I wanted to explore and suddenly realized that I was thinking about the whole thing in a roundabout way.

There’s really no need to think hard about having the perfect idea. The foundations of popular and profitable websites/services are deeply related to the basic reasons why people get online and use the internet. Let’s do some reverse engineering from that perspective.

So, why do people worldwide use the internet?

1. To communicate and socialize

This is very much a fundamental human need. People like to meet and talk to other people through the internet. They use it to maintain new or existing relationships. They want to communicate ideas and find solidarity with others who share similar interests. So do something which facilitates communication. Hyper-local or cross-border communities, social networks, virtual worlds, apps or services built on existing communication/social protocols and services. Bring human social activities onto the internet grid. Socialize existing web functions, emphasize on connecting people.

2. To find information, learn new things and be entertained

The internet is a massive archive of new and old information. It is also a source of pleasure, giving immediate gratification in the form of images, sound and interactivity. As an educational tool, the web is essential for people who are seeking to learn.

People want to find things online. So help them. Create a system which provides information or filters existing content. Monetize the flow of data. Blogs, training courses, social news, aggregated news, paid membership sites, online journals, one-stop entertainment portals, video, image and game hubs with a specific focus.

3. To do work, generate income and run a business

People use the internet to make a living. It is essential to many businesses that want to increase brand exposure or sell a product/service. They also use the web to help them work better. There is a market of webmasters, entrepreneurs and small/big businesses out there who are willing to pay to boost their revenue. Consultancies, design firms, freelancers, enterprise software, business-specific tools/apps and services. Think of ways to help people work smarter and more efficiently online.

And of course, there’s the e-commerce industry and the buying/selling of products. There’s really a lot more specific reasons why people get online. Everyone of them is an idea for a product/service/website. Most likely there’s already someone out there in the same niche doing the same thing. The question is not how many competitors are there but how saturated and fulfilled are each web user’s reasons/needs.

Differentiate by presenting alternate solutions. Or stand on the shoulders of giants and improve existing services/websites even more. Learn to do some clever marketing and you should do fine. Cut your losses early by quitting when you’ve lost the passion or will to work hard. Because one rarely gets profitable or influential without interest or perseverance.

Just some thoughts I had. I wrote them down as a reminder and decided to share. ^_^

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Everyone Uses the Internet for a Reason

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