Online Marketing Sydney, Internet Marketing Australia Freestyle Media

Internet marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Internet marketing is a component of electronic commerce. Internet marketing can sometimes include information management, public relations, customer service, and sales. Electronic commerce and Internet marketing have become popular as Internet access is becoming more widely available and used. Well over one third of consumers who have Internet access in their homes report using the Internet to make purchases.(Devang, 2007)”

I find the 4 components it has split it up into:

Information management - I see this as being almost like content management, information structuring and usability.

Public relations - Article PR, Blogging and search engine optimisation have got to fit in here.

Customer service - This is really about eCRM, call centre interaction and basic customer service principles.

Sales - I see this having Persuasion, advertising and marketing strategy under its umbrella.

Which places could you work on?

I have changed my email subscription service over to Feedblitz. It wasnt too much of a hassle but I was having some serious troubles with the previous service. I have been subscribed to a couple of blogs that use this service and have been quite happy with the way it has worked. I am super keen to get some feedback on the new service. One of my subscribers gave me some feedback about the old service so I have changed it.

You can subscribe to this new Email update service here:
http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=189830

A Private Interview with Michael Kiely

Michael Kiely is a eDirect Marketing Guru and someone who ranks very highly on my cards when it comes to copy and strategy. Michael talked to me about his current ventures and online businesses and these have been transcribed below.

Who are you and how did you get into online marketing?
I am 54 years old and so was not in the dotcom generation, though I studied its activities from the outside. I went off and did a certificate in ebusiness so I could include online in my strategic recommendations. But I was still an outsider. Then I discovered BLOGGING. I blogged my brains out. Set up more than a dozen blogsites, built my traffic slowly, watched the traffic through StatCounter. Then the skies opened and the hand of God touched me on the forehead. Faced with selling all our flock of superfine ewes and lambs (and lose 7 years work breeding for the style of fleece we want), we had to come up with $80,000 to hand feed them for 100 days … In one night, I built a reverse blogsite (top down info instead of bottom up) appealing to the visitor to ‘adopt’ one of our sheep. I presented our story and included appealing pix of the sheepies, added a Paypal donation button, sent out a couple of press releases, and waited. Nothing happened for a little while. I emailed my lists and that brought my first ‘sales’. But one of the newspapers picked up the story and ran it, in a small item. But it was enough to start a media frenzy and that whipped up a buying frenzy. 5000 hits in a day. 2000 adoptions in 6 weeks. 25000 hits in that time. Most interesting was the online ‘conversations’ and links people put up. They drove the whole wave. Every media outlet put a link. People who adopted put up links and contacted their networks. Adopt A Sheep was an online phenomenon. We took the order and delivered the product (A personalised certificate of adoption featuring a photo of the sheep) online.

If you run more than one website. What is the name and URL of your primary website?
I have so many, I haven’t got a primary site.. www.michaelkielymarketing.com.au but it’s about my past, not my future. www.carboncoalition.com.au is the future. www.adoptasheep.com.au is the present.

The internet provides access to global audiences and markets. Where are you located and is your market influenced by your location?
I live on a wool-growing property 4 and a half hours from Sydney by road, in a location called Goolma, on the Dubbo Road. That’s why I want to build an online business. So I can deal with people all over the place and live in paradise here.

What were the circumstances that led you to start your site/online business?
I had a midlife crisis and wanted to get out of the city/corporate circus.

What does this site do?

Are you a full time web business person or do you have other income as well?
I am a writer. I write ads. I am a strategist. I have some consultancy clientsi n the climate change business.

There are many methods of promotion for website. What do you do and which do you think are the most effective?
PR. Word of Mouth.
What techniques did you use in the beginning to launch the site?
I stepped on a success landmine in December and learned so many lessons.
Background: We ran out of cash to hand feed our sheep and ran out of grass.
So, faced with sending the entire flock of 2600 to slaughter and lose 7 years of breeding for superfine wool (which no bastard wanted to pay for anyway), we went public and appealed to people to adopt our sheep for $35 a head, the amount required to feed them for 100 days (the planning horizon during a
drought). Action: Bodgied up a blogsite with PayPal to take donations. I thought we’d get 6 or 8. (Friends and some of you kind people were the first to respond. Thanks Mike and Michelle.) So I sent press releases to 2 Sydney dailies - SMH & Tele - and waited. Two days, 3, 4, and a call from Tele asking for pix. Sent what we had. No, need a sad pic of farmer and wife. We took one, hard not to laugh. Day 6, 6.30am Sydney radio stations start calling. Small item in Tele. Channel 7 calls. Can they land a crew near the house at Uamby? 2 hours filming reduced to 1.45 minutes on that night’s news. Tele and Channel 7 put links on their websites. Channel 7 promos the spot on every break during the news and runs it last. Kabloom! 5000 hits on blogspot. 100 adopted. Next day: SMH online calls. More links. More radio stations. Louisa and Daniel, no training, giving interviews on air to listeners all over the eastern states. Orders pouring in. 10000 hits by start of week 2. Channel 9 sends a crew. Today Show. Daniel features. More links. More radio. Serious backlog of adoption certificates (personalised with name of sheep (+pic) and name of adopter. Calls from adopters - when will they get their certificates? Need them for Xmas. (Xmas! Forgot about that.) 20000 hits and 1000 adopters later, 3 of us getting 4 hours sleep a night, handfeeding sheep and churning out certificates, while fielding media and ‘where’s my certificate’ calls.
Recruit local business centre for help. Disaster. Customer complaints. Recruit sister-in-law. Great. Need more sheep portraits. Maxed out hard drive in my laptop. Crash. Byebye files. Phone keeps ringing. German journalist arrives to write a piece on the drought. In the next 3 weeks his articles appear in 4
major German online and offline newspapers. We are flooded with hits from Germany - 500 in a day. Put up a German translation of the blogsite with link on landing page. Local papers and radio arrive late for
the party. What’s that rumbling? The rising drone of the online conversations about us. StatCounter lets me see where hits coming from. Follow hits backwards to source to find links. Turns out people are posting stories and links on their personal blogsites, discussion groups arguing about the rights and wrongs of farming in Australia, quilters and knitters and spinners and crafty ladies telling each other they adopted, highschool girls (lonelygirl15) adopting a lamb for company in their adolescent cocoons.
People telling people what they’ve bought other people for Xmas. Wealthy people send a cheque for $1000, ‘inspired’ by what we are doing. Japanese man thinks he can take delivery of the animal. “Crikey! You’ll have to pay more than $35 for that, Cobber.” That’s Life magazine does a feature. More radio results. In the midst of the chaos, sniping comments left on blogsite by animal rights activists and farmers accusing us of not being financially crippled enough to deserve the money. (Response: “I’m just doing my best with what I’ve got.”) Calls from farmers begging for some of the money. Charity begins at home. “I’ll save my sheep first, then yours. I can’t help anyone if I go broke.” (We put full step-by-step instructions up on blogsite and flag it. We call NSW Farmers to discuss taking the program national.)
Negative blog comments spark large response from other commenters, positive. Cards and letters flooding in. Visitors turning up unannounced. Guided tours. Every adopter says they’re praying for rain. Christmas Day: People are opening gifts to find our one of our lambs, rams or ‘ma’ams’ have come into their
lives. It starts to rain at Uamby. 40mls. More than we’ve had for a year. It’s raining money, too. Results: Our target $87000. Total Week 8: $70000. (We had spent $60,000 up to when the appeal started.) Still fulfilling orders. Many fell through cracks when computer crashed. Also lots of no-show of certificate (sent via email) because customer changes email address, spam filter knocked it back, inbox full, etc. Still “where’s my certificate?” Customer is always right. No, not “customer” in our case. New friends? No. We are now family. This farm is their farm. These sheep are their sheep. We got an email from a lady in Sydney asking if “Benny” (a male lamb sponsored on behalf of Ben, an elderly gent in London who loves Australia and cricket) would send Ben a note of encouragement, as he had fallen into a
coma. I wrote back that I told Benny that Ben was ill and he said, “How sick is he?” I said: “He’s as crook as English cricket.” Benny said, “No one can be that crook…” and dictated a note to Ben. We heard later that, after getting Benny’s message, Ben started coming out of the coma. Our first miracle! Promotional Budget: Media $0. Website: $0. PR: $0. Reason for Outcome: 1. Novelty. Most people unaware of adopta-animal programs overseas (NZ, USA, UK), as I was until after we launched. 2. Convenient Christmas gift.
many grandparents said it solved a problem for them, buying for a bunch of grandkids. They could do it all online in 20 minutes. 3. Drought. Many people were effusive in their thanks (and we were the ones who were thankful) for giving them an opportunity to do something for farmers suffering in the drought. (We told everybody we weren’t the most deserving, but they didn’t care. We offered them the opportunity,. and the most deserving didn’t.) 4. Spirit of Christmas. Giving. Next steps: Expand the relationship. Expand the family.

What are your main sources of revenue from the site?
Currently from adoptions.

Where do you see key opportunities in the future for revenue?

We have a business concept which we are ‘conceiving’. It started with the desire to get a fair price for our wool, commensurate to the quality of the product we grow and the effort we put in. We intend to process and manufacture products for sale to consumers. The adoption scheme gave us the start of the process of identifying likely customers. (Unintentionally.) We will sell fleeces to spinners and craftswomen. We will spin the wool into yarn and sell it to knitters. And we will offer customers the opportunity to select and pattern or submit their won, and we will make up a garment, using a local knitter. I was blocked trying to think of how we could locate customers, but Adopt a Sheep opened the door. Our “Parents” might respond to the opportunity to purchase the fleece from their sheep, or the yarn, or a garment. On top of that we are exploring the opportunity of selling products with ‘their sheep’s’ image on, such as t-shirts, coffee mugs, cushions, mouse pads, key rings, etc. These ideas are based on the belief that some (not all) of our “Parents” would like to deepen their relationship with their sheep and with Uamby. We also expect to have members of our new family come to stay and help with the sheep. Other products we could produce include postcards, childrens’ books, photograph books, a book on The New Australian Farmer, a book on the ethics of agriculture (my field of study), a DVD on adapting to climate change. Further, we are deeply engaged in the climate change issue and will have ’soil carbon credits’ for purchase soon, based on carbon sequestered in our soils and those of conservationist farmers from across Australia. We want to roll the whole concept out - already I have one young lady selling photos of their farm on Ebay to raise money for feed. I have helped her with publicity and website construction. Louisa and I are starting a series of seminars across the State to teach other farmers how to do it. We see this as part of our Mission to bridge the city-country gap. We then see opportunities for us as the retail shopfront provider for farmers who want to engage their ‘new families’ in the way we have outlined above - ie. we provide them with the infrastructure and management. We could also provide a farm stay booking service for farmers. All of this is driven by one thought: save the family farm, as an economic unit and as a sustainable environmental unit. Give farmers access to new revenue streams and incentives to conserve the environment by bringing city people and their needs and expectations into the equation. (Ie. an adoption scheme requires that the farmer be ‘green’ and ethical in their treatment of animals; growing soil carbon requires ‘green’ land management techniques.

Where do you see yourself in a few years time?
Surviving climate change.

If you could give two pieces of advice to aspiring or new webmasters/internet business owners, what would they be?

• Try to build a fan club or a family, a community around your brand/business.
• Look for the emotion in the relationship. Emotion drives engagement which drives involvement which drives value exchanges (sales etc.)
• Act with absolute integrity and be open about everything.

I am talking at the Wholistic Business Network on Thursday at 8:15pm about marketing your business online. I will be giving a short and snapping talk which will give you a taste of some of my secrets which I am revealing at my February internet marketing seminar on the 28th of February.
To go to this event on Friday here are the details:

When: Thursday, the 25th of January 2007

Time: 6.30 p.m - 10 pm

Where: People Know How , 21 Parraween street, Cremorne, Level one

Cost: $15.- Donation

I am talking at 8. 15 p.m, here is what the program says:

“4 secrets to supercharge small business marketing online” presented by Fred Schebesta

Online marketing has become an ever more important feature that many small businesses are missing out on. How to be effective and knowing what to do (and what not!) is key to successful online marketing. Fred Schebesta is part of the new generation of direct marketers who are introducing the disciplines of direct marketing into the glamorous internet ‘space’. Too much money has been wasted online by people who don’t know what they are buying who hire web people who don’t know how to maximize response. Whether you are experienced or are still learning the secrets of increasing your business on the net , come and learn about the cornerstones of online marketing.

1) How to use the search engines
2) What to put on your site
3) The 1 thing that will increase your sales by 50%
4) 3 simple things to increase traffic

Fred combines proven and traditional approaches with new thinking and ideas. Using this vision and translating the direct marketing approach to online marketing has resulted in innovate, successful campaigns for his clients which he shares with participants.
Fred has built his business Freestyle media into a fast-growing online marketing agency and at only 25 years old he has 15 full-time staff with Group revenues exceeding $1M in the past financial year. Freestyle Media is an established innovate online media agency with major clients including Sanitarium, University of Newcastle, McDonalds Australia, Laser Sight, Acer Computers, Dore Australia, Bausch & Lomb, Wide World of Sports, Fuji Xerox, Thomson Education Direct, and Rabobank. www.freestylemedia.com.au & Fred Schebesta’s Blog www.OnlineMarketingSydney.com.au

We launched the Ashes Cricket website and it is turning into a glowing success. Key success elements:

1. Ashes Cricket Microsite - A microsite like this ensures that visitors dont get lost in all the other content weetbix provides. This way there is a place for visitors to easily go.

2. Ashes Download - This is a desktop application that sits on peoples desktop and sends them updates whenever a wicket falls. This is great for the user connection and continuing an ongoing relationship with the visitor of the website. I personally think having something on the customers desktop is very powerful and is a massive brand extension for Weet-bix just being a tv commercial and box of cereal!

3. Ashes On pack Competition - The competition does around 900 entries per day. Its a great traffic driver for the website and gets people to the website. The sheer depth of the website and other elements to it builds that engagement.

4. Brett Lee Ashes Bowling Game - This flash game is superb! Its very addictive. It comes more from the mindset of the bowler and allows you to think and play like a bowler. Its quite mathmatical and has some good smarts built into it.

Let me know what you think?

“Text banners are boring… they’re not going to get anyone’s attention. We should have an animated banner that grabs people’s attention!”. Is that statement really true?

While I was doing some research I stumbled across an IBM banner that I really liked. You may have seen this before.

The screenshot below shows the IBM banner ad to the right of the page (click on screenshot fora larger version). It looks like a special feature of the ZDNet Australia website. Would you believe it? There’s not one bit of animation in it! No sound, no video, no huge images.

It’s an HTML banner that’s clean, simple, and shows off how IBM generates results for its clients. The banner is full of invitations for the viewer to click through to the IBM site. It goes against all the Flashy, animated, in your face banner ads that we see nowadays.

This example shows that not all banners need to be flashy, entertaining, or have shock value. Banner ads need to be able to communicate to the right people at the right time. If being a simple HTML banner ad with barely any imagery and no animation is the way to go, then do it.

Don’t get me wrong though. Flashy, entertaining banners have their place, but perhaps not so much for IBM, especially on the ZDNet website. ZDNet readers are there for news, information, and ideas for solutions. Don’t waste the reader’s time on anything but that.

So if you’re considering a banner ad campaign as part of your online marketing, take time to talk to your agency. Assuming you have a marketing plan all ready, here are some things to ask yourself and your agency:

• What are you trying to achieve with the banner campaign? Do you want to build brand awareness, customer database, brand reinforcement, or a sale?
• What will be the best way to measure success? Results of a follow-up market survey, number of subscriptions, leads/enquiries, or number of sales?
• Will I want to reach all my target markets, just one, or a select few?
• What do I want to tell each of my target market(s)?
• Which websites will provide you with the best exposure to reach your target market(s)? Your agency should have a good idea of what may be most appropriate.
• What placement can I acquire on these sites and how will the timing coincide with our marketing plans? Your agent will find this information out for you. It would help if you had an idea of when you want to run your banner campaign.
• What banner creative will best communicate our message to the target audience? Your agency will provide you with a couple of concepts based on your brief.

You know already that it’s all about going back to marketing basics. Don’t be afraid to explore simple HTML banners if you feel that it will work for your next campaign. Flashy isn’t always going to give you the results you’re after.

Here is a story that is happening right now. My friend Michael Kiely has a farm full of sheep, and unless you have been living under a rock you will know that there is no water its dryer than my mouth when I wake up in the morning after a tough night boozing. So what he decided to do was allow people to adopt his sheep! (http://adoptasheep.blogspot.com/)

This new campaign has been spurred by using email marketing to Michael’s Thought Of The Day list (A golden read), A great blog, Some serious blog posting, Some press releases and a good bit of old follow-up and some good old Word Of Mouth.

Michael’s PR was so successful that he was on the Channel 7 News!!

It takes at least 7 visits to your website before someone purchases something from it.

In support, comScore Networks V.P. John Miniati said at this year’s IR Conference, “People don’t always convert in the same web session when searching.” Their study found that only 17% of search-initiated sales (mostly movie tickets and flowers) occurred during the same web session. 20% occurred in later online sessions and 63% in latent offline purchases.
John Miniati, vice president, comScore Networks Inc.

Now even though I am a high-end web user, my own personal experience confirms this. At the moment I am looking at buying an information product, online. It costs US$997.

The person who wrote it is renowned for being a guru in his space. On his website there are near 100 testimonials extolling the product’s virtues and value. But, I still haven’t purchased it. These are some of the things I have done:

• I have googled his name, visited his website and looked over the materials at least 3 separate times.
• I have read reviews about the product on others’ websites.
• I have looked through affiliate sites and read tips on the product by those who are currently using it.
• I have researched the supporters’ websites to confirm their authenticity and see how their business is performing as a result of applying this product’s instructions.

I guess I want to get as much information and ensure this is the right product for me, before I purchase. At the end of the day I am going to have to take that leap of faith and just try the product. There is a money back guarantee but I am very skeptical about those kinds of things.

The concept I want to show you is that you need a lot more than just information and a ‘buy now’ button to persuade customers to transact on your website.

You need every single piece of evidence to build credibility about you and your product/s. This information is partly what will convince customers to buy from your website.

The other factors are a) a decent product, and b) potentially the most important element – a genuine relationship with your customer.

A relationship is defined as:
Dictionary.com – “A connection, association, or involvement.”

In order to start the relationship we need to get a connection, association or involvement with this other person. In everyday, a business relationship is built on the following milestones.

First Contact – By accident or design you meet, exchange contact details and a first meeting is set up. The relationship has the ingredients (contact details) to begin. The communication using these contact details is the basis upon which the relationship can be formed. Interactions follow, which build and grow this relationship.

First Meeting – Following from the exchange of details you meet and get to know each other further. At this point you haven’t yet worked together but feel it may be possible, so a proposal is requested – the relationship is new and fragile.

Proposal written and received – At proposal stage you receive pricing estimates, detailed solutions and can begin to place some sort of value on the relationship; its future costs and benefits. If the proposal is pursued, the relationship becomes an “involvement”.

If the proposal is not accepted, efforts can still be made to build the connection or association. For example, if a supplier and ourselves were to partner up and pitch for a particular piece of business, to the person receiving the pitch we would be associated with each other. This association is only in infant stage as it hasn’t yet been tested although it still exists.

On the other hand, if I were to simply meet this supplier at a networking event and introduce him to a third-party, our relationship at this point would be described as a “connection”.

How do I replicate these face-to-face contact experiences online?

The above example is a very physical way of explaining relationship building although the same principles apply online.

First Contact – You might search, receive an email, click on a banner ad or hear from someone else about a particular website. The key thing here is that you have the contact details of the domain name. Hopefully on the website you can get more contact details to extend the communication to other mediums like telephone, mail or face to face.

First Meeting – A visit to a company’s website is your first meeting. Just like when I first went to the information product’s website for the first time. I met the company for the first time and I scoured through their website.

However, this is where ‘real-life’ and ‘virtual-life’ differ. Although we are having a ‘meeting’, I have yet to introduce myself to the online company. At this moment I – as the consumer – have the company’s details, but they don’t have mine. Only 1 way communication is possible.

The only way they can follow-up and take me to the ‘proposal stage’ is by capturing my (the consumer’s) contact details. In order to foster the relationship they need some way of contacting me and continuing the conversation.

As an online company, what can you offer to get those contact details?

A FREE enewsletter – If people opt-in to your newsletter signup they are interested in what you have to say. Sure, some competitors might opt-in but in general, anyone who opts-in will be very interested to hear and read about what you have to say.

A FREE eBook – Wrap up all that initial information you would normally give a prospective client in a first meeting into an ebook. An ebook has 1 rule, “It must contain high quality information or you will lose ALL credibility with your subscriber.” These ebooks do take some time to prepare although they are a master capture device for contact details once you get it them and running.

FREE articles related to your product or service – You are an expert in your space, and as a prospective customer I want to hear what you have to say. I want to see how your products/services might benefit me. A great thing to realise here is that anyone who provides their contact details because they want to read your articles is very interested in what you have to say. Your credibility as an expert is increased immediately and the prospective customer will be more interested in building a relationship with you.

A FREE download – Giving away a trial version of your software or a free version of a little software tool to help them is a superb way to collect contact details if you are selling software.

What I like about it is that the visitor can experience what your company is like to work with by using your software. I also like the tangible nature of an actual piece of software being installed on their computer. This is a good sign of relationship potential as they had the confidence to install your software on their computer. I would say that this is an “involvement” with you. If you were to meet this person who has downloaded and installed your software and have a chat with them you wouldn’t be coming in cold. They might say, “Oh I know your company I have been using your trial software for ages.” This is a relationship that has been going on without you knowing.

Sparking that 2 way relationship

You have collected their contact details, they might have started an involvement but you haven’t spoken back yet. To build that relationship and not let it fizzle out Send them an email. You must be tactical with what you send them but say something back. Your communication is enabling that customer to build a connection with your company. If for example you were to meet this person at an event and you said you were from XYZ company they might say, “Oh, I know your company I downloaded your ebook and you sent me a mail the other day that really inspired me to reconsider my options about your product.” You are not a stranger, you have a connection with this person.

How do you get an online customer to look at your proposal?

Just as with the face-to-face example, when your customer has expressed an interest in you, you need to give them your proposal. At this point they are clearly interested in building a “more intimate” relationship with you. The online way of doing this is to include an offer in your email.

An offer is a proposal shortened to a good headline, linking to a web page with more details. Your proposal/offer needs to be in line with what you have been discussing in your communications. You don’t want to be randomly discussing a completely different product.

Once they have accepted your offer this is not the end of the relationship. Customers like to continue to building confidence in you. They may repeat purchase, or if yours is a one-time-use product (such as laser eye surgery) they could refer you to friends and family – especially if rewarded for doing so. So after they have accepted your offer, send a thank you email.

If they don’t accept your offer there are other ways to continue building the relationship and we will address these in later chapters. However the key steps covered in this session are to:

1. Get online browsers to give you their contact details
2. Email them in response to their action/request and include an offer
3. Reply with a thank you (or follow-up) email.

Get started with these steps and by the time that “How to build an online relationship with customers: Part 2” reaches you, you will have many consumer leads upon which to implement my next chapter. See you next time.

If you weren’t able to go to the seminar on the 15th of November you can still signup and pay on the webstie to receive the videocast and podcast and the other benefits. Its still $49 but you can watch it whenever you like. I have had around 30 people do this even though around 85 people attended the seminar itself.

Purchase the videocast and podcast of the seminar

I like interviewing webmasters from time to time to find out some info about them and their web businesses. Following is an interview with Mark Doust who runs www.site-reference.com a web forum for people with new web businesses. Some great advice in here that I think is valuable especially on how to get started. Very interesting method of promotion in terms of referral marketing and article PR.

If you run more than one website. What is the name and URL of your primary website?
Site Reference (http://www.site-reference.com) is easily the largest website that I am associated with. I am also working on NFL-Forums.com and BrewingKB.com, although these are more hobby sites at this time.

The internet provides access to global audiences and markets. Where are you located and is your market influenced by your location?
I am located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Although my market is not influenced directly by my location, I always find it fascinating to see the demographics of my visitors.

What were the circumstances that led you to start your site/online business?
Initially I got started on my own sites/businesses after I found myself without a job. It is amazing how much motivation you can have when next month’s rent depends on making some money. I have actually always been involved in some business venture in one way or the other. I love the process of starting something, growing a business, and watching it morph into something entirely on its own. I promise you that at any given moment, I am working on at least two or three new projects.

What does this site do?
Site Reference is a resource for webmasters with a concentration on the newer website owner. We offer advice on web design, search enigne optimization, and various marketing methods. We also have built an extremely useful community of users in our forums.

Is this your only site?
Sometimes I wish it was. I always have new sites being built.
Are you a full time web business person or do you have other income as well?
I am a full time web business person and have been fulltime since 2003.

There are many methods of promotion for website. What do you do and which do you think are the most effective?
Well there is no single answer to this question – it depends entirely on your website. What works for an information based site like Site Reference will not necessarily work for a retail website.

Site Reference depends almost entirely on people referring other people to the site. We try to publish high quality articles which others will refer to their friends, talk about in forums they participate in, or link over to in their blogs. This has been extremely effective for us for years and will certainly be a corner stone of the site’s continued growth.
But as I said, of each of the many methods available, I am not too partial to any one in particular. I think PPC is a great promotion method if you are selling a product or service with a known value. Article marketing (if done correctly) can be extremely good if you are selling an informational product.
But if I were to talk about my favorite and least favorite, it would break down like this:

Favorite Marketing/Promotion Method:
Referral marketing/viral marketing/public relations. This is so powerful, and so cost effective, it is easily my favorite method of marketing. Unfortunately, it is also one of the more difficult methods to master (I certainly have not yet mastered it). The web’s most popular services and sites today grew as a result of referral marketing.

Least Favorite Marketing Method:
SEO. This may surprise some people, especially since I focus a lot of my time personally on SEO. The problem that I see with this method is that people tend to rely on search engines making sales for them. It makes absolutely no sense to base your business’s success on the whims and fancies of another company that you have no control over. Don’t get me wrong, SEO is great – I love SEO as a bonus to any marketing campaign, but I would never base the success of my business on a search engine.

What techniques did you use in the beginning to launch the site?
Site Reference was built using article marketing almost exclusively. Article marketing falls under that referral/public relations in my opinion. If you write quality material that actually helps people, you will quickly find that you will be looked to as a resource.

What are your main sources of revenue from the site?
Ad sales are the primary revenue from the site, although the site does fairly well with affiliate product sales and adsense revenue.

Where do you see key opportunities in the future for revenue?
Really just an expansion of the advertising sales. Site Reference is recognized by literally hundreds of thousands of website owners. At the same time, we try to keep our ad rates extremely reasonable that our advertisers can see a real return on their investment.

Where do you see yourself in a few years time?
I’m sure my wife would like to know the answer to this one as well. When I look back on where I was five years ago, I never would have thought I am where I am today. So where will I be in a few years? I honestly don’t know. I see no reason to believe that I won’t be building new sites that will hopefully help people in some way.

If you could give two pieces of advice to aspiring or new webmasters/internet business owners, what would they be?

1. Just get it done. I talk to so many people who say that they want to work for themselves or get something started, but they never do anything about it. When I was first starting out on the Internet, I had a full-time job which involved the Internet. So after a full day of work online, I would come home and spend an additional 6 – 7 hours working on my computer. It certainly was not fun, but the work needed to be done.
   If you really want to start something, realize that you just need to get it started. Plan your steps, but most importantly start doing and stop saying that you want to do.
2. Do not be afraid of technology. Learning the technical side of the Internet (such as how the Internet works, how to manage the basics of a webserver, learning HTML/CSS and a basic programming language) is invaluable. Do not be afraid of it – it is actually easier to learn than you may think. Iniitally it will seem completely foreign, but as you continue to expose yourself to it and play around with technology, it becomes quite easy to manage.