For small companies starting out, one of the most important things to have, other than a great product or service, is a strong brand. The largest companies in the world spend billions of dollars a year to build or maintain their brand supremacy. It isn’t easy to establish your brand, but sometimes a few simple steps can help; I’m going to look at one of these steps, and analyze the effectiveness of giving away promotional materials (swag) for the remainder of this post.

Case Study of Promotional Advertising and Branding: Geni.com

After mentioning a great new company called Geni.com in a previous blog post, (Geni has become the place to go for family social networking) I was contacted by the company. As a result of their email, I wrote a post about the power of effective follow-up in marketing, where I talked about how following up with your users/customers is essential. The company told me they’d send some free swag because I’m such a fan (and because it is a great branding opportunity) and I promised to do a final wrap-up post if the company came through and sent me some cool stuff.

Did they ever! They came through with flying colors, shipping me (via Fedex, no less) a mousepad, pens, stickers, a baseball hat, and 2 t-shirts.

Think it’s just a cheap ploy? Lets look at what the result of sending me the swag will be:

• As you can tell, I look good in that shirt! I’m definitely going to sport it around town, providing a lot of really cheap branding for Geni.
• When I tell my friends about the site, I’m sure to mention the stuff they sent me and I’ll certainly use words like “cool” and “check it out”.
• I’m now writing the 2nd post completely devoted to Geni and how they are smart in their marketing. This provides the company with even more publicity.
• I’ll probably give the stickers away to some local kids because I have no real use for them. This is great for the company because kids love stickers and they are sure to put them somewhere interesting and visible.

All in all, giving away promotional materials is a smart, inexpensive, and effective way to help build the strength of your brand.

There are tons of different techniques for promoting your business or website, and one of the more popular ones is by using article marketing. Simply put, article marketing is the act of writing articles about a topic with the goal of getting the readers to contact you or visit your website. I will cover article marketing in more detail in another post, but I wanted to talk about an experience I’m currently going through with a very popular site called Ezine Articles.

Like many other article submission sites, this site relies on authors to log in and submit articles which are then published on site. Anyone can use the article on their site, provided it is not altered and provided the byline is included.

The Failure of EzineArticles.com
Back on March 30, 2006 (YES, LAST YEAR!) I signed up and submitted an article to the site. As I’m a busy guy, I forgot about the article, but came back to the Ezine site recently in hopes of submitting another one. To my shock, I noticed a bright red notice: PROBLEM – Not Live. Trying to figure things out, I saw in tiny font, a notice “Problem: General Error – Please contact us to find out more.” Of course, I contacted them and waited.

It has now been over a week! Despite a message telling me that I’d be “contacted shortly”, I have not heard form a sole. The irony is that they have an autoresponder sending out the following message:

Hi,

Thank you for contacting EzineArticles.com’s author support center.

Every email is human reviewed and our normal response time is within
24 business hours, Monday thru Friday.

Thanks!

http://EzineArticles.com/

Looks like there is a lack of humans or something over there!

Now, I’m just another angry customer. The people running Ezine Articles have failed to establish an efficient customer service platform and people like me have fallen in the cracks. Instead of getting free positive publicity from me about how great their site is, they now have to deal with this post, telling people how they have failed to do what they set out to. People sometimes say “any publicity is good publicity” – that is certainly not the case here!

As the famous quote from Cool Hand Luke goes, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”!

What is the lesson to be learned?
Customer service is #1! If you can’t keep your users happy, especially in this day and age, the backlash can be quick and extremely powerful.

BTW – I sent a trackback to the company’s blog and the blog of the guy I think is in charge. Lets see if they have a response now . . .

9 Steps To Successfully Market to a Forum Community
In a previous post The Direct and Indirect Approaches to Forum Marketing we talked about the two approaches to forum marketing. I’d like to share the 9 steps you will want to follow to forum marketing success; this is basically a primer on indirect forum marketing (the only approach I fully endorse).

1. Find a forum in the niche you want to market to
2. Check to be sure the site allows you to create a forum signature with a link to your business
3. Set up an account
4. Create a forum signature that includes the following information: your name, website/business name, web address, contact info (if any), description of the website/business (DO NOT USE A SALES PITCH – e.g. The Best Car Parts Shop Around – that stuff is useless). Be descriptive!
5. Find the forum introductions section (most good forums will have one) and tell people about yourself. Talk about your business, but don’t just drop a sales pitch. Let people know what your interests are in the topic beyond your business.
6. PARTICIPATE! Become an active member of the forums. Help others on the site. Get involved in the debate. POST, POST, POST! In time, the members will see you as an expert in the topic. With more posts, your site/business will have more exposure, and you will see results.
7. If the forum has an area for members to advertise in, use it. (if not, don’t post ads on the site; just use your forum signature and your knowledge to do the selling for you)
8. Volunteer to become a moderator on the site (forum administrators will often be willing to trade advertising for good moderators). In addition to the opportunity of getting more exposure, moderators are typically given more respect and looked at with even more authority then other members. With this comes more clicks and more business!
9. Find other forums in the same area of interest and repeat steps 1-8.

Not only have I used these techniques, but I see others use them every day on my site! It is a proven formula. Give it a try and I know you won’t be disappointed!

Forums (aka. message boards or discussion boards) are incredible resources. Not only are they helpful for learning and helping others, but they can also be valuable tools for marketing your business or website. There are two approaches you can take in using forums for marketing; the direct approach, or the indirect approach.

The Direct Approach

Some might call this the SPAM message of forum marketing . . . I certainly do. The direct approach is basically the hard sell. You go to forums that are in the niche you want to market to and pitch your stuff. Have a gardening business and want customers . . . go to a gardening forum and post a few messages telling people what you do and sell yourself. Everytime I see someone do this, they post multiple messages around the site that are all sales pitches; on a good forum, these posts are typically removed very quickly as is the member posting them.

Is this method effective?
It depends. If you happen to catch people who are looking for someone like you, then it probably is. On the other hand, people don’t like things shoved down their throats. The hard sell typically turns people off. Many forums have rules forbidding such behavior outside designated thread areas for that exact reason. The hard sell is ineffective mostly because there is no long-term way to sustain it. You can’t keep posting ads on a forum without being asked to stop.

Would I recommend the direct approach?
Absolutely Not! Many forum administrators consider these posts to be SPAM. Posting ads on forums can get you banned very quickly in most reputable discussion boards.

The InDirect Approach

The indirect approach is more of a soft sale technique. The premise of the indirect approach is by participating on a site and helping others, you will gain the members’ trust. Eventually, you will be seen by those people as an expert in your area and they will start flocking to you. I witness this every day on my real estate forums. Many of our members are extremly helpful to others on the site. They spend their time giving advice to anyone who needs it. Soon, buzz around the site starts flowing and that member begins to get extremly busy. We have members who have built their businesses through the goodwill they have generated on our forums.

Is this method effective?
The indirect approach is simple and effective. I have used it to build traffic for many websites that I run, and see people use it on our forums as well. Don’t believe it? Try it out yourself!

How do I implement the indirect approach?
To effectively use the indirect approach, just follow the 9 Steps To Growing Your Business Using Forum Marketing.

Keyword Marketing

SEO aka. Search Engine Optimization is an art. For those of you who don’t know what SEO is, it is the process of optimizing a webpage/website so that that page/site ranks higher in the various search engines. Higher rank=better traffic. There are many keys to proper website SEO, and one of the main ones is the keyword.

Focusing your efforts on certain keywords can really pay off. I have been able to acheive 1st page rankings for several keywords I focused my energies on for various websites I run by properly conducting keyword marketing. The traffic that comes from the right keyword can be very nice!

Keyword Research Tools

Picking and choosing keywords to focus on used to be much more difficult because there weren’t all the tools back in the day that there are today. There are many pay sites you can go to, but there is just as much great info to be found on the many free keyword selector tools. Here is a list of the various free tools you can use to help you out:

The Best Keyword Tools

• Google Keyword Tool – Top Pick – Enter one or various keywords and find out search volume for the previous month and advertiser competition for those terms. Other data the tool gives out are: Estimated Average CPC for each term, Estimated Ad Position (Google AdWords), search volume trends over the past year, and possible negative keywords. Finally, you can also have the tool search your site to see what keywords it sees; this is extremely useful, as it can help you see what Google sees.
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – Top Pick – Based on Overture’s keyword data, this tool offers much more. You can find estimated monthly search volumes for Google, Yahoo, and MSN, “links to price estimate tools from Overture and Google AdWords, links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker keyword research results.” There are tons of other features here and you can spend a long time just exploring all the resources related to a few keywords. This tool is a must for anyone doing keyword optimization!
• Overture Keyword Tool from 123Promotion – Like the other Overture based keyword tools, you can find related terms for any keyword, but where this one is cool is in their estimated searches for the term and related keywords Per Hour (Avg.), Per Day (Avg.), Per Week (Avg.), and Per Month (Previous month). Best of all, it will also project the search traffic over the next 12 months, and will project the traffic per year in 3 Years time.

Other Keyword Tools

• Overture Keyword Tool – The grand-daddy of keyword tools – this one has been around forever. Just enter a keyword you want to learn about and you’ll find other related terms with the number of searches conducted in the previous month for that term.
• DigitalPoint Keyword Selection Tool – Another oldie but goodie. This tool (a bit annoying because of the very long captcha required with searches) just repackages the Overture keyword data, giving related search terms and number of daily searches for those terms.
• Webmaster Toolkit Keyword Tool – Using various search engines, this keyword tool will find related terms based on the one you enter in their form. This tool, I believe, is most useful in seeing the different related keywords that each search engine chooses.

You can apply one of only two models when it comes to dealing with online advertisers.

1. Establish a high set of standards and eliminate anyone who does not fall in that set.
2. Keep your standards lax and let pretty much anyone advertise with you.

MODEL 1: Keep High Standards
Those people who use the first set of guidelines usually do so because they want to be perceived as a site that people can trust. If you are someone who uses these guidelines to deal with potential advertisers, this may create a moral dilemma at times. When you operate a website that becomes successful, more and more people will want to advertise with you. The problem is that people want to throw money at you, and if you have standards, you will have to reject more people then you accept. That can potentially be a LOT of money!

Over the past month, I’ve personally rejected hundreds of dollars in potential ad revenues through various ad networks I participate in and from direct ad sales. I don’t know about you, but that creates a real quandry:

Do I take the money (we all really love money!) offered by advertisers, or do I uphold my standards and not let just anyone advertise?

MODEL 2: Allow Anyone to Advertise on Site
By allowing just anyone to advertise, your site can quickly become a marketplace for schlock. At first you will definitely make your money, but I think there are long term implications for doing so. Larger, more reputable advertisers will not want to be represented on a site overloaded with non-targeted garbage sites. The longer you allow these advertisers on your site, the more you dilute your perceived quality and eventually the actual quality of your site.

High standards are what made Starbucks, WalMart, McDonalds, etc. into the successful companies they are today.

What do you think?

I’ve been using Text Link Ads (aff.) for some time now, and I have to say that I’ve been extremely happy with the service. I do have some suggestions, though.

As it stands, publishers can choose to approve individual advertisers on their site through the network. The problem I have is that there is no time horizon for which these ads will run on your site. Essentially, your advertisers have a permanent place on your website.

Text Link Ads Needs to Change!

No rational publisher would sign an indefinite contract with an advertiser. It just makes no sense!

The Text Link Ads platform needs to allow publishers to have an out. If an advertiser is no longer welcome on a site, publishers should be able to log in to their account and terminate the agreement. The relationship should not stop immediately, but should continue until the end of the billing cycle or 30 days, whichever is longer.

I realize that I am just a lone blogger making this suggestion, but I believe that it is in the long term interest of the company to do something about this issue. I guess I just wanted to put it out there and get some feedback from the rest of the blogosphere.

Thoughts?