Now marketing your business online is all about driving traffic to your systematized site that converts prospects to customers, clients, partners, reps or whatever your objective is. Driving traffic can be done on or offline which I will talk about in the course of this series. But the ultimate goal is to get the right people to your business website. There are also 2 types of traffic, organic and paid traffic. Organic traffic basically is free traffic, mostly through search engines and other means that are not paid for, while paid traffic, as the name implies, is traffic to your website that you pay for, e.g., PPC, affiliates, banner ads etc. All of these I cannot start to define and explain here. However, if you would like to know what they mean, and how they work, you may want to check out the Internet Marketing resources at network with social.com.
That being said, it is only logical that you want the cheapest traffic for maximum profit right, and that’s where organic traffic comes to play. Now you need good content on your website for people to find you via search engines. And that’s where I started my marketing.
I started writing blog articles for my websites that are targeted at my desired prospects and was sharing them on various social media platform, including FB, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, YouTube and other article directories. I even syndicated content from other websites to fill up my blog, so that, at least I have something to show, not the very best practice for search engine ranking, but of course I will eventually replace them with my own articles.
Now, at this point I realized it was not going to be easy doing this for both of my business websites, i.e, writing original and unique articles. Though both websites are in the home based business category, one of the websites is targeted at those wanting to learn how to build their businesses effectively online, while the other is specifically targeted at those looking to start a new home business. If I was going to effectively market both websites, I’ll need 24 hours of the day, seriously.
There have been significant changes in the ads system of many of the social media since the last time I used them for marketing, so some learning have to be done. Now this is in addition to the other marketing strategies I will be implementing. I did not mention this, I am still in a 9-5 job, so I do my business part time, leaving me with very limited time to achieve a lot. Again I should also remind us that I am the designer/marketer of my websites and businesses. Thus, I believe you will understand when I say I will need 24 hours of the day to market both sites effectively.
So I had to re-strategize. I decided to concentrate more on marketing walebello.com fully and treat network with social as an affiliate product. I am also working on fully marketing network with social via affiliates, encouraging other website owners to make quite an appreciable commission selling its product, so if you are interested you may want to check the affiliate program at networkwithsocial.com. A lot of referring by walebello.com and other websites to network with social will be done, using product banners, sending emails to subscribers, blogging, etc.
In the meantime, I have started building the social media audience for walebello.com, bearing in mind that I’d also be selling products from network with social. As at the time of this write-up I have close to 200 connections on LinkedIn, just over 50 on Facebook, about 70 on twitter, quite a few on Instagram, 2 subscribers on YouTube, some on WhatsApp and a few leads in my email list.
So part of my goals for now is to grow these audiences, of course they have to be targeted. You need a good number of people, fans, etc, to sell to continuously. That part of what makes your marketing efforts economical. You don’t want to always look for fresh new prospects anytime you need to sell something, it just makes sense to always have readily available and willing people to positively receive your sales messages. Part of the strategy is to keep creating content to be shared on these platforms. Now this is what I have observed about my content creation strategy, at least on social media. The more you put out there, the more you get people attracted and interested in what you have to offer, so I see it as being a very effective marketing strategy. The downside is that the financial results may not be initially encouraging, but when it does eventually start to produce the results you desire, it is exponential.
That will be it for now. Next time I’ll let you into the first Facebook PPC ad I did, the results I got, the technical issues that came up due to high traffic to the site, how I try to build my Likes free of charge (not really working quick enough), and much more. So stay tuned.