Do you have an aggressive online and/or offline marketing campaign that just isn’t bringing in the goods?
Maybe you’re effective at reaching your existing audience, but you’re just failing to bring in those new customers. Social media is all good and well, but if no-one shares your posts, how do you expand your reach?
And if you’ve exhausted the audience for a particular search term, what is there left for you to do in terms of SEO and AdWords? Here are some ideas that will help.
1 Join Forums
Forums are a forgotten opportunity for many modern-day SEOs thanks to the popularity of social networks (Facebook killed the forum star?). Don’t you forget forums though, as they are a great place to meet passionate people who will be happy to not just click your links, but also often promote them for you free of charge across the web. Do this right and you can build a legion of friends and followers who will help you handle your own marketing.
2 Give to Those Communities
Of course, they won’t do that for just anyone though. If you want to see the real power of internet communities and harness that for your online marketing, then you need to spend some time giving to various communities before you try and get value from them.
So, visit a forum regularly and post good-quality questions and answers. After a while you’ll make friends and develop a good reputation, and then when you post something you want to promote you’ll find that the whole forum rallies around you to help. Many of the most successful Kickstarter projects and other small business launches have been the result of a ‘grass roots’ movement that started in an active community.
3 Find Marketable Stories and Send Press Releases
You know what’s even better than using a guest post to get a link on a high ranking site? Being covered by various media across the web without even asking and getting free links from big news/industry sites. How do you accomplish that? By thinking of how you could create a story around your site, and then sending that in a press release to the relevant sites and magazines.
If you have something interesting to offer but no one is listening, then you need someone to tell your story. Just make sure that you understand the kinds of things that members of the media are willing to publish. They’re not going to be interested in offer you free advertising: you need to have a story that is actually worth covering.
4 Re-Use Your Content
Spending hours writing content for your site can be a laborious and tiring process, so why not get more use out of it and use it to make some more profit? Create an eBook for instance out of your best articles and you can sell that on Lulu and Kindle without damaging your site at all, then use that to find new customers.
Likewise, if you’re struggling to think of new content and write it up every week to share on social media and forums – why not try resharing your existing blog posts in new places around the web?
Oh, and if you don’t already have a blog then you absolutely need one!
5 Get Out There
Another tip is to make sure you aren’t purely constraining yourself to digital marketing. There is a lot of potential in old fashioned marketing via leaflets and flyers. So, get out there and post through letterboxes, contact a Los Angeles marketing agency (or one local to you), send snail mail, print business cards…
There is still something incredibly powerful about actually holding something with a brand printed on it. Don’t miss out on that!
