Two Years Later...What's Changed in How I Market Online

Two years ago, I set out to market my 3D site, C4Depot.com and was pretty successful all things considered.  I would like to mention some hits and misses I made over those years.

Feeder Sites are NOT a Good Idea  Two years ago, prevailing wisdom said you should pick URLs that would match what people were searching for and build sites to catch that traffic. I actually posted on this, and while it made sense two years ago, it is no longer a valid strategy. 

Building a bunch of feeder sites is a looser's game for a number of reasons. First, everyone, including search engines love authenticity and hate the opposite. A real site that is the living, breathing representation of a business will always outperform a site that is only built to catch traffic no matter how good your URL is. 

Secondly, if one site is difficult to maintain with new content, then multiplying that for every feeder site you have is pretty much impossible to accomplish unless you have a staff of people to help you. Google is pretty smart at figuring out which sites are legitimate and which ones are just dead hooks floating in the water.

Initially my feeder sites were very successful in directing traffic to our primary site, but apparently Google caught on to that strategy, and overnight, our feeder sites dropped in rank from #1 on Google to completely off the radar.  Our primary site, C4Depot.com, however, did not drop, but has gained steadily since then.  Why? Because C4Depot.com is a real site which is supported with YouTube,  Twitter, and Facebook content and is updated on a fairly regular basis.  We also work hard at driving traffic to our primary site and Google sees that.  The feeder sites which were just dead billboards in cyberspace were flagged as such by Google's algorithm and were  punished accordingly. 

So, my advice for marketing a web page as of this day is to focus on one site and don't build a bunch of other sites hoping to catch traffic.

Don't Be Afraid to Blow Cash on Advertising

Granted, most of us don't have a ton of cash, but look at it this way.  If you have a site and spend $1,000 marketing your site on Facebook and only sell $500 in product, but get 500 people to opt-in on your site and get 500 likes on your Facebook page, that means you spent $500 to build a legitimate list of 1,000 people.  That's pretty good groundwork for your future marketing. 

I know spending money is painful, but I would recommend spending $100 dollars at a time on Facebook until you stop getting the market penetration that you desire. Each time, you can target a different country and monitor your results. We have steadily increased our Facebook ad campaign spending each time we release a new product, and it seems to work well for us.  Currently, between Facebook and our opt-in list, we can now reach over 12,000 qualified customers.

Engage Your Customers Frequently on Social Media, but Don't Bother them With E-Blasts

It's always a good idea to connect with your fans via your site blog or social media, but don't send them e-mails every week unless you have something really good to share with them.  I reserve sending out bulk e-mails only for new product releases, free give-aways, and a reminder that a promotion is about to end. In each case, there is a notification about an expiring discount that can be grabbed.  One thing I hate is getting too many e-mails from some ambitious marketer, so I try not to be one.  Again, blogs and social media are a different story, so use those as often as you can.

Make Friends with Other Movers and Shakers in Your Industry and Partner Up

Lastly, there's always someone out there with a bigger list than you have. Give them something you've got that they can profit from and promote on their site. This can be done using affiliate plugins that give your affiliate marketer a piece of each sale.  If you do this, you can get a quantum boost in market penetration overnight even if you don't make much cash. Remember, your list is your crown jewels, so a bigger list is always a better one.

That's it for now. Next time, I'll talk about my experience with Shopify.

Cheers

James

The Free Give-Away Really Works for List Building

When we launched C4Depot in 2013, we had good success building "likes" on our Facebook page by offering some free software tools. After a few months, we had approximately 3,000 "likes", but after the initial splash, the new likes died down.

Concurrently, we installed two opt-in forms on our web page; one was called "Opt-in Pop" which is a pop-up window with an opt-in form which launches automatically when someone lands on your site. We also had an opt-in squeeze form which comes standard with our WPeStore shopping cart module. Between those two squeeze forms it was a slow build to get confirmed opt-ins, and took the entire year to get 2,000 confirmed registrants using the squeeze forms. This was largely due to two reasons: 1) we spent most of the year focused on generating paid-for products, and 2)  a squeeze form requires someone to not only register on your site, but to also confirm their registration via e-mail.   This extra step of confirming a registration is probably the cause of attrition. Nevertheless, a real e-mail address is far more valuable than a Facebook "like" for future marketing.

Every time we would launch a new product to our less than 2,000 list members, we would see a spike in sales for that 24 hour period.  This was really great, but developing paid-for products is very time consuming and sometimes it would take two months to create a new product. There had to be a better way to make money than just developing new products and launching them to a small audience.

Spending your valuable time producing free give-aways to generate traffic is a difficult mental and emotional hurdle to make.  My temptation was to always attach a string to the free give-away in hopes of making a sale.  My associate, Kyle, on the other hand, had a clearer vision of the passive income model and after repeated conversations, finally convinced me to focus more on traffic rather than launching paid products.

To that end, we created a free download page which can only be accessed using a password which you receive when you confirm your registration to our site. We then publicized this page along with a follow-up broadcast with a video featuring our best new free give-away product. We launched the broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and to our own list.  The page and video for the give-away area here: C4Depot Back Room. Amazingly, for the first time, we got reTweeted by several people and we saw an immediate spike in confirmed opt-ins on our site; eighty new members for one give-away to be exact.

Since the quality to your list is always high considering your list only consists of people who voluntarily agreed to join your page, it is safe to say that your online revenue is a function of the quantity of subscribers to your list.    Therefore, to state the obvious once again, it is more important to build your list than it is to have new things to sell.  Think of it this way: what is more difficult; to produce a new product or to present an old product to a new person?  I think the answer is obvious.  For this reason, building traffic by giving away valuable free content may be counterintuitive and difficult on an emotional level, but it is the model for generating traffic, building your list and generating passive income online.

Great Ad Rotating Plugin for WordPress

If you've got an e-commerce site, two things you're going to want to do is offer free stuff to increase traffic, and make sure you advertise your flagship products on your own site.  For example, offering a gardening tutorial is a great place to advertise your magic fertilizer.

If your site is driven by WordPress, one plugin that has worked for me is AdRotate.  I had some difficulty getting this to work due to a lack of documentation, but once I found the right tag to use for my ad, everything worked fine.  Here's a clip of the code that worked:

AdRotate will permit you to cycle through a group of ads where you want people to see them.  Remember: you know what's on your site, but a new visitor may land on a page and not know the answer they've been looking for is on a different page of your site.  Cycling ads in the margin is a great way to boost sales.

Cheers

James

Infinite Arctic — New Cinema 4D Plugin by C4Depot

Clipart for Sparkol's VideoScribe — New Site Launched: SVGClipart.com

You've all seen those promotions where a hand sketches a cartoon while you listen to a voiceover. Well, now it's possible to download clipart that you can just drag right into Sparkol's VideoScribe without doing any time-consuming editing to the clipart.  SVGclipart.com has just been launched so anyone can create an animation using an auto-drawing whiteboard application.SVG Clipart

In this video you'll see how SVG Clipart.com provides clipart and cartoons in scalable vector graphics format to draw cleanly and efficiently in auto-drawing programs such as Sparkol's VideoScribe. Welcome to SVG clipart.com — a library of clipart elements designed to draw cleanly and efficiently inside auto-drawing programs such as Sparkol's Video Scribe which you can find at sparkol.com. If you've ever used a program like video scribe, you know that it only accepts the Scalable Vector Graphic file format. Our cartoons can be opened and edited in Adobe ILlustrator, and have been carefully constructed to draw smoothly and efficiently inside Video Scribe. Here's one of our cartoons being drawn now. You can see how nicely these cartoons will tell your story and engage your audience. Converting an Illustrator file to draw properly in a whiteboard application like VideoScribe takes a lot of time and effort, and if you've ever tried to do that, you'll know how much time our cartoons will save you. We also have talented cartoonists, so if you need a special graphic created, be sure to send us an e-mail. Thanks for visiting.

Google Keyword Planner — A More Accurate Reflection of Global Keyword Searches?

If you're familiar with the Google Keyword tool, you'll notice it's gone and has been replaced with the Google Keyword Planner

https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home?

If you're interested in the details of the changes to this tool, I recommend this article from Andre Alpar's Search Engine Watch blog which goes into depth on the topic. 

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2289304/Google-AdWords-Keyword-Planner-vs.-Keyword-Tool-SEO-PPC-Feature-Comparison

The most noticeable thing about the Keyword Planner is how many fewer global searches any phrase will get.  For example, right before the Google Keyword Tool was taken down, the keyword phrase "cash back" and "back-cash" both produced identical monthly search results of over one million searches per month.

The Google Keyword Planner produces a much lower number of 22,000 for "cash back" and the phrase "back-cash" gets 70 global searches. 

Which tool was producing more accurate results?  Nothing useful is showing up in the rumor mill, however, in the past, the Keyword Tool was criticized for producing bloated global monthly search figures. It's more likely Google is trying to reduce the number of people seeking to "game" the system using longtail URL phrases with transposed words. In all likelihood, the new Keyword Planner is producing more realistic numbers.  To produce more accurate search results for their users, Google needs to discourage people from choosing URLs only for the purpose of attaining page rank. To do this, both the Google algorithm and Keyword Planner need to work in sync. Since "back-cash" now shows significantly lower global monthly search results than "cash back", it probably means the Keyword Planner is delivering more accurate numbers for global monthly searches and is a more accurate reflection in how the Google algorithm is working and how keyword searches are being conducted.

The false sense of elation we've been feeling when we've found a URL with high keyword traffic in the past, will now be replaced with a more realistic sense of frustration as domains which get legitimate keyword searches will be harder to find using the new tool. Sometimes the truth is hard to take.

Niche Selection

Late this spring, I helped a friend create a web page within a very competitive area. We grabbed the domain a longtail URL using the old Google Keyword Tool (yes, it's gone, I noticed this just today) showed a significant monthly volume, but with high competition. We launched the page without any video and to this day, our URL has not shown up on the front page of Google.

In contrast, our smaller niche business, Cinema 4D Models (c4d3dmodels.com) is doing exceptionally well. I attribute this to the fact that the C4D site is a smaller niche with far less competition. Additionally, we have used many videos to promote each URL we own with targeted landing pages and video.

My conclusion is this: achieving good page rank inside competitive categories is not only difficult and time consuming, but without a persistent and well-rounded marketing effort, may prove to be more frustrating than profitable.  If you're trying to rank in a competitive category and don't have time to create videos and perform all the due diligence I've written about in this blog, you may be better off buying your traffic by launching a press release.  I've never done this, so I can't vouch for it, but for $300, it may do more for your page rank than spending thirty hours of your time trying to build traffic in your off hours.