Saturday, August 22, 2009

6 signs that your startup needs a new marketing team.

Here is a post that outlines 6 different things that may be a sign that your marketing team is not fit for the Job.

1. Whenever someone Googles your startup's name, pages about your site on websiteoutlook, compete.com, alexa, about.com come up in the first results page.

This means your marketing team has only been updating a few wiki pages and checking up the value of your site instead of getting you valuable users.

2. Whenever someone googles your startup's name, they don't get press releases about your startup on the first page, and hardly one profile for your startup from either myspace, facebook, folkd and definitely not twitter.

Your marketing team is not leveraging the power of press releases and they are so web1.0.

3. Your startup is less than a year old and traffic increase has been less than 30% in the recent months.

Growth is very slow, its time you put your marketing on steroids.

4. The only links you can find about your startup are the ones you put up yourself, obviously no blogger thinks it is worth writing about.

They are not sending the right message about your company.

5. Your webmaster's inbox is always empty, seems nobody bothers to know where you headed.

They lack creativity.

6. The Google Pagerank of your just months old site is thesame after 2 Google Pagerank updates.

They have never heard of authority sites. They have been link building for a while but hardly get a link from any site that is not a low traffic directory.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Internet Marketing that has worked for me.

Tips on promotion techniques that have brought traffic to my site for free.

>>> Google.
Google will always be on top. Atleast since I don't have a Yahoo! directory listing. Back in 2004 when I cleverly got my website listed in the Yahoo! directory for free, Yahoo! used to be my biggest traffic source.
Now even if I do secure the listing, I don't expect my Yahoo! traffic to exceed the one I already get from Google. My site is doing really good on the Google SERPS with top 10 listing and even #5 listing for my best keyphrase and #1 for many other keyphrases. (Atleast 3 more).
Well incase you want to know what my secret is, content. Content is the key, build more pages, link to them from blogposts, Digg them and more traffic will come from Google.

>>> Yahoo!
I am doing decently well on the Yahoo! search, (though I don't know how well I will still be doing since they turned to Bing). The thing is, this time around my site doesn't have a Yahoo! directory listing so I don't expect Yahoo search to favour my site in it's result so much.

>>> Nairaland
Participating on the Nairaland forum has helped me a lot scoop up some home website traffic. I get significant traffic to my site from 2 of the threads I participated in on the forum.
Here are some tips for participating on Nairaland.
- Respond to threads that have lots of activities, with responses into the hundreds.
- Some Google PR of 1 or 2 would do.
- And please say something reasonable. (it's ok to include a link on your response or add a sig file).


>>> Twitter
As long as you follow the right people and get followed on twitter, you will get some traffic to your site and lot's of mention about you. participate in discussions, send @replies, follow the right people and update your status regularly. Just logging on and listening to what others are saying will give you the idea on what to say.


>>> Digg
Digg it, don't spam it.

>>> Stumbleupon
Make friends with people on related industry, stumble their favorites and make sure they like you so they stumble yours too.

>>> Hubpages
This is really a great service. all you have to do is write and publish articles, ping them and add them to other social bookmarking sites and watch the traffic grow and Google Pagerank rise. You can publish a good article and it can reach a Google Pagerank of 2 in a few weeks. You can also network with people in related industry so they know when you publish a new hub. You can publish weekly, though publishing monthly isn't bad at all.

>>> Blogging
I started blogging early, probably around thesame time that blogging experts like Yaro Starak started. It was really great then back in 2004-2005 doing wonders with blogs and pings.
Well blogging is not like it used to be. I have had blogs with close to a thousand daily visitors. But now apart from this blog, I only use blogs for some link building.

>>> Reciprocal links
links I requeted from other webmasters.

New techniques I will be using

Press release
article marketing ( I have done this to some extent, but not big time).
squidoo lenses
paid ads