AFP 31: 7 Actionable Strategies For The Marketing Challenged
September 27, 2012 Have you ever had a great business idea, but when it came down to selling it or getting your product out there you felt stuck? Have you sat down to start promoting your blog and didn’t know where to start? This podcast episode is for you!
7 Tactics for the Marketing Challenged
We were talking to “John The Intern” about how to promote his business and he started telling us how frustrating it can be when you don’t know where to start. Should you just post content and hope they come to your site? Should you reach out to A-List bloggers and hope for a guest post? We sat down this week to discuss our thoughts on the best marketing strategies for new businesses and blogs. We’re far from the best marketers out there, but we thought we could share some strategies for us “non-marketers” that do actually work.
Check out this week’s episode here:
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Topics Discussed This Week Include:
- Ways to pinpoint your target market
- How to iterate on the success of your competitors
- Using backlinks to target interview opportunities
- Systematizing your marketing efforts
- Splitting your time between outreach and content creation
Mentions:
- Our 99designs contest – We want a new look for AdSense Flippers and went back to 99designs to get it done!
- Blog Weekend Bootcamp – A great event we attended in Davao City to help out new and intermediate bloggers in the Philippines.
- Ria Jose – Well known Davao blogger…was great to hang out with her this last weekend!
- Codecademy – Great for learning the basics of several different programming languages. For beginners!
- LeadPlayer from Clay Collins – The link is to Pat Flynn’s EXCELLENT review of this WordPress plugin.
Now…over to you! Any marketing tips for non-marketers you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments below or feel free to say hi on Twitter! Or…you can use SpeakPipe to leave a message below and have a chance to be featured in the next podcast!
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Discussion
Guys! Thanks so much for the mention of LeadPlayer. I’m grateful. And Pat Flynn did do an excellent job with the review. Grateful.
–Clay
No problem Clay. I keep saying your player used more and more every time I watch a video!
Hey guys, long time listener, first time caller here.
Really enjoyed this episode. I’ve listened to it a few times and shared it with my partner. As we are finishing up our product dev this episode is really helping us figure out how to direct our marketing for our upcoming launch.
Thanks for the continual great content!
Awesome…thanks, Jeremy!
Yeah, as a non-marketer, trying to wrap your head around how to get your product/brand out there can be a beast, hehe. Do let us know when you launch and maybe we can help you get the word out?
Hey Justin
Thanks for the offer. Much appreciated. I will definitely let you know.
Never thought there was such a term as “marketing challenged” but I guess you’re right. Strategies were great. Love it!
Thanks Mike, glad you liked it! We’re always trying to be original with our terminology!
All my sites were hit with this update and I think that people from Google don’t say a true about 0,6% affected results. I don’t see any template how google evaluate site to be “low quality”. If the only reason is existance of adsense on site, they make “shot in their own leg”.
My EMD sites got hit my the latest algo change as well. I found that the EMD sites I spent the most time building took the weakest hits to SERPs. They are also my most aged EMDs. Do you think that this will mean your build process changes from being a 4-5 month process to a 8-10 month?
We’re still waiting a bit to see how things turn out, but we’ll likely be making significant changes to our process. We’re going to have to “ugrade” sooner than planned and, as always, we’ll be detailing our journey here on the blog! More to come…
Love the tandem, I think you should do a lot of these.
Hey guys, I was wondering if any of your sites have been affected by the most recent algo update from Google?
Hey Rob,
We avoided Panda and we only seemed to take a slight hit from Penguin, but this latest update seems to have been a more significant setback. We’ll be giving it a few days to assess the damage and adjust/tweak our strategy. More to come!
Hey guys another great show. One spin on the forum thing. I find going into a forum they are often oversupplied with people who are prepared to help. Often finding threads where people are asking for help it’s difficult to find something that hasn’t already been well answered. The other thing is it takes ages to read through forums that have heaps of replied already.
As an alternative what I like to do is create original content for the forum. So see it as like a blog post but you just give the good content as a brand new thread to the forum. Do this enough times and you’ll get noticed and you don’t have to step on other people’s toes who often go in and answer people’s threads.
Agreed Dan, orginal content is good. John uses this strategy. However, you don’t want it being so good that it would be better placed on your blog! Maybe for sort thoughts or somehting that doesn’t take a full blog post.
Justin, your so right about the slimmy, pause feature in the video player.. its bad a few guys have implemented it and its like the most annoying pop up ever. BUT im sure it will get lots of sign up ..
As always great to hear your debates and insight to the business.
I was expecting to hear more about the new internship at the end of the podcast.. I guess you were just sketching out that its going to happen some time..
Lots of actionable ideas. The comment on blogs is well something i did to much maybe. it does achieve the objective though i.e. it works you can make great connections with other readers etc
THanks Steve, we’ll have more details on the upcoming internship soon.
One important thing that makes your podcasts entertaining is that there’s more than one speaker. It flows much better than a solo podcast, in my opinion.
Agreed, it makes it easier from our point of view as well. Glad you liked it.
Excellent podcast. And you guys are really entertaining – it’s easy for me to listen to. I totally agree about the shift in mindset needed for most people.
Thanks Jessica, but I think we will pass on a career in enterainment! 😉