jcCommerce

Marketing Secure Delivery - Part 1: Crazy Stuff

4th September, 2007 - Posted by Chance -

This will be the first in a series of posts on marketing Secure Delivery.

Ok, you know how sometimes you hear about an online marketing technique and you say “That’s retarded, that can’t get good results!” and move along? Well, for shits and giggles I tried some of them out!

I hesitate a bit before writing this post because people might think I’m stupid. Let me be the first to admit that most of the methods I played around with in this post are not that great- Heck I can’t believe I tried a few of them myself. Still, I’d never done them before and didn’t want to be smug and pass judgment without experience so I gave them a go-

Here are the dubious Internet marketing techniques I tried out over the long weekend:

1. Paid $5.00 to have Secure Delivery bookmarked across 50 unique accounts in a certain social bookmarking site that I know has brought me good traffic on other sites in the past.

2. Paid $1.50 to have Secure Delivery bookmarked on 25 different social networks like del.icio.us, stumbleupon, etc.

3. Paid $7.50 to have Secure Delivery submitted to a couple hundred directories ranging from PR2-PR5. I think they submitted the site to some backwater search engines too, but who cares about that?

4. Paid $10.00 to have Secure Delivery reviewed across 7 blogs ranging from PR2-PR3. These blogs have no traffic, but they did have pagerank so $10.00 for some non-0 PR reviews seemed like an OK deal to me.

5. Built up my Squidoo lens and Hubpages hub for Secure Delivery. I made these a while ago, but never really did anything with them. Now they have content.

6. Emailed several blogs, ranging from A-List to Z-List, requesting either free reviews or paid review pricing. It never hurts to ask! Interestingly enough, the blogs that I am willing to pay are the slowest to respond!

7. Paid $7.00 to get 3000 unique visitors to Secure Delivery, supposedly targeted to US and UK home business. Yeah, a long shot but for $7.00 why not?

Notes:

You will see that I paid paltry sums for most of the things on this list. That’s because I can’t be bothered to create social networking accounts, manually type in my site’s details to a bunch of directories, or set up a bunch of ghost blogs and make posts. Hell- you see how infrequently I post on this blog… imagine if I had 10!

Most of the work was secured on the Digital Point forums in the Buy, Sell, Trade section. There is a glut of people there willing to do horrible jobs for a few bucks (my guess is mostly in developing countries) and I took full advantage of that to eliminate repetitive work.

I had pretty strong opinions about all these things going in- I knew #1 would work as I’ve done it in the past, but I’ve never paid someone to do the boring repetitive work. Based on my experience with #1, #2 seemed like a fair bet for some back links. #3, 4, and 5 were done purely for the SEO benefit, if any.

#6 Will be the best bet for traffic and exposure for Secure Delivery if I can get people to reply (*cough* Adnan *cough*). Of course, with prices ranging from $120-600 per blog this will be the most expensive method too. I’m going to make a separate post dedicated to buying high-profile reviews after I’ve managed to actually secure a couple in the future :)

#7- buying traffic- is in my opinion by far the most useless on the list. Buying “unique visitors” has always been a fools game in my opinion, but to be honest I’ve never actually tried it before. I figured, “eh, what the hell its $7.00″ and gave it a go just to see anyway.

The Results?

We’ve gotten a few free sign-ups. We had our first free sign-up conversion to a paid subscription. Our traffic in the first 5 days of this month is more than all our traffic in the past month.

In total we paid $31.00 and got more than a handful of free users, a couple paid users, and our first free-to-paid conversion. Our traffic has increased exponentially (although its not all quality traffic) and Secure Delivery is getting some exposure and SEO benefit from the reviews and back links.

Was it worth it? Eh, maybe. For the SEO we’ll see in 30-60 days when the new domain comes out of the Google Sandbox. The sign-ups are nice and its fun to see big bars in my web-stats graphs. Technically if I get 3 sign-ups out of the whole deal its paid for itself, but that remains to be seen as this is only the first day after setting it all up.

While most of this was academic and done for fun, toward the end of the month I’ll post a followup and tell you how it all worked out.