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Yesterday, Maki (owner of DoshDosh.com) wrote a blog post titled “Marketing your Website Without Search Engines.” I’ve always said, when teaching traffic strategies the Google is not the only game in town. In fact when you get down to specific topics Google is sometimes one of the smallest traffic sources.
For example let’s say you had a Photoshop related product, maybe a video tutorial…
Well Google claims a little more then 300,000 people on average are searching for that keyword on their search engine. It’s also a VERY hard keyword to rank for since tons of people are trying to rank for it. It’s been said that even the #1 listing in Google for any keyword only recieves around 50% of the clicks.
Now we’re down to around 150k – 160k possible traffic each month. Then you take a look at a site like tutorialized.com, that Quantcast.com says gets over 800k visits per month and over 4 MILLION pageviews per month.
Of course just because you put an advertisement on their site doesn’t mean you’re going to get all their traffic. Although, just like if you were good at SEO you could have a #1 ranking in Google… If you were good at banner advertising you could get a 1% click thru rate on your banner.
At 4 million pageviews per month a 1% CTR would be 400,000 visits per month and that’s just one banner on one site! What if you had banners on 3 sites, 5 sites, 20 sites?
So How Would I Market My Sites Without SE’s?
1.) Forums:
I’ve said it a million times, forum marketing is the most underrated traffic strategy of any other free traffic method. If I had a Photoshop video course I would join any of the hundreds of photoshop forums found here. Then I would setup my sig box so that a mini-headline and link to my product was shown under every post I make in the forum.
Then I would devote 2 hours per day to try and make 5 posts in five forums per day. That would be 25 drops of my headline and link. Depending on the popularity of the threads I’m posting in, that could mean hundreds to thousands of impressions to my “ad” everyday.
We have outsourced this in the past as well. We just told our assistants to stay in the “Introduction” areas of the forum and say hello to every new person who posted an introduction. Then if there was a “website reviews” section they would make one small generic comment about each site that posted a thread asking for a review.
It’s very possible to ad an additional 25 – 200 visitors per day using forum marketing (depending on popularity of the forums).
2.) Banners:
This is another traffic method that I hear a lot of people referring to as “dead” and I ask “then why are there still so many of them?” Seriously, lots of people are still using banners from fortune 500 companies to super affiliates for cpa offers.
I would run a search in Technorati to find every photoshop or design related blog that had Adsense on it. By them having Adsense I know for sure that they are interested in making money from their blog. Then I simply contact them and ask them how much it would cost to replace their Adsense ads with my banners.
With most blogs even if you offered to triple whatever they are making from Adsense you could still be paying less then $30 – $50 per month.
3.) Social Media:
Earlier this week I created a specific blog post that would attract people from social media sites, specifically social bookmarking sites. The blog post took me about 50 minutes in all to create, then I watched an episode of House (one of my favorite shows!).
When House was over I checked my stats to see if it was working and sure enough… 106 visitors in just the first hour! 78 of them just from StumbleUpon!
I would blog everyday, I would shoot quick video summaries of my blog posts and submit them to Youtube. Then I would post status updates on Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter about my blog posts and Youtube videos. My blog stats right now tell me that I get about 20 – 30 visitors per tweet that I send out about my blog. Not bad for about 30 seconds worth of work it takes to write a tweet!
Then I would just focus on building my followers like a mad man on all three networks so that I’m getting more and more clicks from each status update.
There are a lot more things I could do also since I didn’t even talk about offline tactics. I remember when I first started I thought all there was to traffic was article marketing. Article marketing was LIFE to me, but now I know that the traffic is out there, you just have to go out there and get it!
Go Bigger,
Justin Brooke
