Akhil MK
Startup Hybrid Marketer
A few Unbinded Stuff(plus : also check my blog for more)
Project |01
The Lucky 13 New Product Marketing Plan
Who told you that “13” aint lucky? Watchout for these steps as you aim at skyrocketing your new product/services’ sales!
1. Start with a clear goal (eg: 1000 product sales; even though in most cases you're sadly mistaken) and set benchmarks for each stage of marketing process so that you don’t wander through.
2. Consider the EMS approach in all of your marketing materials (Educate,Market,and Sell).
3. Create great content. Preferably in 4 formats — Audio, Image, Video and Text. Great content educates the visitor to filter whether the product is something they should be interested in or not.
4. Then overcome objections, create some anticipation, and implement a Call to Action. And don't ever ever forget to give them an offer they can’t refuse. Tell stories. Get people involved. Make it fun and meaningful.
5. Offer a “no pain, all gain” refund option to build confidence. Thanks Chris Guillebeau for this one.
6. Sent out beta product to the influentials before the official launch. Ask them to contribute their reviews. (Build karma points with fellows. Better, help them in advance with their projects.)
7. Get to the first sale as quickly as possible. Find out bet time for launch. I prefer traffic that's of high visibilty,steadily growing months before the launch, and is of low noise.
8. Target marketing around the experience the product provides, not the product itself. In other words sell safety, not a lock.
9. Measure relentlessly at each stage. More data is better than less in most cases.
10. Drive Tsunami traffic just before the launch (not highly targeted or purely untargeted) to the site.
11. Nurture Your Leads. Treat them with respect and motivate them to be your customers. Even better, make them proud.
12. Close the campaign and evaluate. Gather it all. Anything went wrong? Don’t worry, better luck next time. Feeling great? Go grab a beer, or coffee maybe.
13. Produce a before/after story. It’s a great way to mark an end to your campaign.Clue:Weightloss!
PS: Create an amazing product.
Project |02
Is Your blog Doing well What it's Paid for?
"Success is goals, and all else is commentary."
-Brian Tracy
In light of this quote, the success of your blog depends on the goals you've set for yourself while setting up the blog strategy. If you've haven’t set your goals, then a million visitors/day won’t count as success because there's no benchmarks to measure against.
Look for subscribers who are consuming your information. Are they finding it useful? Find if blog posts are leading to direct sales. How many visitors are spending quality time on your site and how many of them actually become regular subscribers of your blog.
If your blog is being successful in building brand awareness about your product or service (actually the no of people who remember your product in the first place while making the purchase) then by all means sustain your policy. But think twice if you are not getting much visibility out of it. Asking your customers simply "where you heard about our product first?" can give evidence to support your blogging efforts.
Also you need to consider the time and money efforts you are putting in are worth the investment. In some cases when you outsource content creation, this becomes more relevant.
Here are somethings that you should specifically measure:
1. Click through rate — The no of customers who actually purchase your product directly after clicking at the links in your posts. This can be a bit difficult to measure as usually it's the last click that get measured when the buyer has made the purchasing decision in her previous visits to the site. Consider this also while analyzing.
2. Bounce rate—Percentage of customers who leave your web site after spending less than five seconds (usually) on your site. Maybe this shows you're getting lots of untargeted traffic or your content isn’t just good enough. Whatever it is, keep a close watch.
3. Paid search engine advertising conversion rates—it's clearly working when average cost per click is low and the rate of people accepting your offer is high. If this is not the case for you, time to press a little panic button.
The great thing about marketing online is that you get lots and lots of data from a variety of sources.
Keeping key performance indicators in mind during each campaign helps to eliminate lots of headaches on your blogging efforts.
How I performed my blog’s onsite SEO with these 3X3 steps
Corbett Barr is right; search marketing is one of those things that takes little time to learn, but lots of time to master.
Yet, from a beginners perspective I’ve broken my onsite optimization process as below:
1. Stated my USP clearly and rebranded my blog — Without differentiating your blog brand, it’s hard to set a proper SEO strategy (especially in keyword research).It also gives you a sense of direction.
2. Registerd with Google webmaster tools and Bing master tools — Registering with these two search giants increases visibility in both search engines respectively.
3. Found relevant low competition keywords using Google keyword planner,Bingmaster ,and Traffic Travis — Google’s new keyword planner tools seem to focus on supporting PPC advertisers rather than organic search marketers. That said, the tool definitely retains some SEO utility. Bing tools are excellent but how much we can formulate a SEO strategy bases on the numbers is a matter of debate. The reason is clear: Google owns about 60% shares in searches whereas Bing's got only 10%.But still I can get a good sense of the nature of keywords with Bing. I found also a great SEO tool in Traffic Travis.
4. Included a sitemap on my website — A sitemap will typically help your site to be better organized for both your audience and the search engines. I was able to skip this step because my Wordpress blog automatically creates a sitemap. You can use xml-sitemaps.com in other cases.
5. Included internal linking throughout my site — Internal linking can be a contributing factor to increased rankings. I Included links within my site to other areas and posts of the site wherever possible.
6. Used the most important search terms in your page title — Included my top keywords in some of the page titles. Search engines rely heavily upon page titles to determine relevancy.
7. Used image “alt” tags on images — This provides a text description of the image. These tags will help the search engines understand what the images represent on your website.
8. Incorporated important search terms in header tags — Header tag is a place to highlight important keywords. Placing search terms within header tags increases rankings and relevancy.
9. Categorized content using tags — Tags help to categorize content for better SEO. If you are running a WordPress site then when you write a post, you can include a number of these relevant tags.
Project |03