Something Finally Worked!

Today, I finally have something that produced instant results that I'd like to share with you.

If you're not aware, my vertical market commerce site is C4Depot. I've been going through the standard grind of SEO stuff people tell us to do, but today something actually worked — instantly. I went to Linkedin and Facebook and identified community groups that are dedicated to Cinema 4D.

These groups, collectively have well over 50,000 members. "How do I get in their face?", I asked myself. As it turns out, you can just post a video or anything on the Facebook sites. That didn't really do much. Linkedin was a different story. After getting approved to the Cinema 4D users group on Linkedin, I was able to post a self-promotion on the group site. This morning, I received an e-mail notification with my post in it. Shortly afterwards, I had almost a dozen opt-ins on my site for the free Studio Kit download we have made available.

As I said, building a community and list is what online marketing is all about. Now I have the beginning of a community. I'll give it a rest and then offer a coupon code for a discount on the site. We'll be cooking up other freebies as well so we don't have to keeping selling the same old stuff each time.

So the moral of the story is: find out where your target audience hangs, and leave a trail of bread crumbs that leads to your site. Start with Linkedin and Facebook, then move out to other forums and special interest sites. Ideally, I would recommend addressing your site in the third person as in: "I found a free download for doing XYZ at this site."

Cheers James Steidl