Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

One good way is to find if there are active forums that relates to the content in your site.

eg. if you site offers advice on strategic planning, you might wanna encourage user in a marketing forum to visit your site for related resources.

Dear Grabfish1,

Might you be in a bit of a hurry?

You say you're using google ad words, flyers, emailings, and banner exchange, and you want to know what else you can do?

Well first, you might want to slow down.

Then, consider who you are marketing to, what it is you're offering, its price point, its value (real and perceived), and the needs of your buyers. Just because you have something to sell does not mean there's an eager audience that wants to buy it.

Time and again business owners go about marketing their
business ass backwards: they find a solution and then go off looking for a market, rather than finding a market and then developing a product that the market in question wants,
needs, can afford and actually lusts after.

There's a huge difference. Except one will cause a lot of problems, while the other, if the business owner concerned has got their wits about them, will make a lot of money.

You need to concentrate less on getting you message out there and more on finding a starving crowd. What's the story here?
What pain point does your product salve that no other ointment can touch? That's you point of leverage, and every vehicle in your marketing fleet must connect to that ointment, must support it and pour benefit on top of benefit.

Too many businesses ignore this and they mistake selling with buying. People buy on their terms, not on the terms of the business owner.

And business owners that concentrate more on sales and less on creating lasting relationships with regular customers wind up
flushing a lot of money down the toilet.

Before you can sell, you must connect and you connect by
creating relationships. The money flows from there.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

You can try free sites like forums, blogs, twitter. It might help.

SEO is a good tool as well where you can get your name tagged and rank.

Luis

Is your target audience general consumers, women, men, teens...or is it niche specific (like quilters, archery, teachers, etc).?

If it's niche specific then an SEO expert can be a big help. If you're simply trying to drive more traffic to your site and/or increase your mailing list, you may want to consider an insured cash prize online game.

What's that? It's where you can offer visitors to your site the chance to win a big cash prize by playing an online game. They need to provide you with their information (name, email address and any other data that would be helpful to your business).

A package including a 3 month online game created for your business with your graphics...along with "cash prize coverage" (IF you have a winner, they pay the prize for you) with the chance to win a grand prize of $10,000 to $50,000....runs only about $4,800 to $7,800. That includes the online game for 3 months, completely programmed for you and your cash prize coverage. So, it's very cost effective.

Having a big cash prize winner is based on odds...and while you can have a winner....(think of the random signals from a slot machine chip) chances are you won't. So a key to a successful promotion is providing many smaller prizes from your vendors or inventory.

Think of McDonald's Monopoly Game and Pepsi's Win A Billion campaigns. They awarded lots of smaller prizes. "Gee, I didn't win the 10 Million...but I got free fries" kind of thing. It makes people happy. And having the chance at a big cash prize draws people in. For example, both McDonald's, Pepsi and Dreamworks have used this coverage in their national and international promotions to create excitement and consumer participation.

In fact, we did one of these for DreamWorks Pictures for one of the Shrek films and lots of other companies big and small. It's fun and exciting.

The goal is to increase traffic to your website, gather email and/or addresses for e-blasts, newsletter or mailings.

If you would like to know more, you're welcome to visit our website [URL deleted by staff] or email me.

Kathy Nunes
Nunes & Associates