What is niche marketing?

Companies and blogs know that in order for their marketing efforts to be successful, they need to reach what is known as their niche audience or target demographic. A niche audience are the Internet users who will be the most likely to purchase a product, be interested in a service, or read a blog. With a savvy niche marketing strategy, companies and websites are spending less money on marketing to people who have no interest in what they have to offer.

Professionals called online niche marketers help companies, websites, and blogs reach their niche audiences by tracking down the latest keyword trends on the Internet. Once a niche marketer knows what users are searching for and how often they are searching for it, they can easily focus their marketing efforts on that keyword niche.

Being a niche marketer, however, does have its pros and cons just like many other Internet professions. The Internet is flooded with tons of people trying to make a living as online marketers, so the profession is quite saturated as it is.

Also, up until recently, there have been very few reliable ways to track down the exact keyword niches that are popular with Internet users at the right time. Not only do the right keywords have to be found, but they have to be found at the right time since Internet keyword trends often change very quickly.

5 niche marketing tips

Even with a couple of big roadblocks in the niche marketing field, there are several ways to be successful. Whether an Internet niche marketer is just starting out or has been trying to make it in the field for a while, here are 5 tips to give you an advantage.

1. Use keyword research

Keyword research is a powerful method of gathering information from multiple sources. Thus, niche marketing software (such as the one found at the Internet Time Machine) is a valuable resource when marketers need to find what niches Internet users are currently searching for. As noted, finding the right keyword trends at the right time is crucial and using cloud computing programs will save time and frustration.

Not only can niche marketers see what keywords are trending online but they can also track what keyword trends are moving up and down in popularity. If a niche marketer sees a term moving up in popularity with Internet users, they will be able to jump on it and use the niche in their search keyword marketing before everyone else catches on.

2. Narrow your marketing tactics

Every day, I come across an advertisement or forum post that includes a link or some other online marketing tactic that looks out of place. A good example of this would be posting a comment on a computer tech forum about a new herbal remedy.

Tactics such as these build website traffic and put the product or business name out there, but if the product or service niche does not match up with the website that it is being marketed on, then it will be ignored. In the same regard, the marketing efforts could be seen as spam, which can be detrimental to any marketing campaign.

3. Accept that not all keywords will catch on

Normally, giving up in any profession is not advised. However, when it comes to niche marketing, there are going to be times where keyword trends are either going to be too short lived to provide any revenue over the long term, or times when trends just don’t catch on as well as marketers thought they would.

In these two instances, it is perfectly all right to move on and direct niche marketing efforts toward other keyword trends. Knowing when to let go of a niche and move on is key to becoming a successful niche marketer.

4. Have an outgoing attitude

Online marketing and keyword niche marketing allows marketers to work at a computer and very seldom do they have to come into contact with other people. To become a successful niche marketer, however, an outgoing attitude can go a long way.

Even though face-to-face meetings are not the norm, online marketers still have to reach out to their niche audience, communicate effectively, and enlist the help of freelance writers, web designers, graphic artists, and other marketers.

At the very least, interpersonal communication is a huge asset. Internet users seem to gravitate toward humor and out-of-the-box thinking. Along with being able to communicate effectively, being outgoing and forward-thinking can help hone the creative skills needed to come up with marketing ideas.

5. Ensure the website is worth visiting

Finally, whether a niche marketer is marketing their own website or someone else’s, the audience is going to end up visiting the website (if the marketing efforts work). However, using niche marketing for a product, service, or blog will only pay off if the user arrives at a website that is visit-worthy.

Visit-worthy implies that the website is clean, up to date, secure, and contains information that the user is looking for. Since marketing efforts are not considered successful unless the niche audience buys the products or services being offered or reads the blog, it is very important that the website worth visiting. If Internet users feel misled in any manner, chances are good that they will not be visiting again.

Summary

You can market an Internet niche in many ways, but these tips should help you find your targets and deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Here are a few characteristics of a strong domain name.

1. Unique

Check out your competitors’ websites and make sure that your own domain name stands out from the crowd. It’s hard to promote your own unique products and services if your website name is similar to everyone else’s.

2. Easy to spell

The easier it is to spell your URL, the easier it will be for people to find your new business. Ever found yourself on a different website from the one that you thought you were visiting? It’s easy to make a mistake when visiting a new website for the first time. After all, domain names may only be a letter or two apart in spelling.

3. Easy to remember

Choose a domain name that people find easy to remember. Test your intended domain name on a friend or two to gauge their response. Can they still remember your website the next day?

4. Pronounceable

Does your domain name roll off the tongue easily? Choose names that are easy to pronounce and can stand alone as a separate word.

5. Short

The ideal length for a domain name is 10 characters or less (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube). If your domain name is longer, don’t sweat it. Anything under 20 characters is still pretty good.

Branding

Consider how well your domain name fits with your business brand. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What does this domain name say about my business to my prospective customers?
• Does it align well with the tone, voice, and tagline of my business?
• Will this domain name still be relevant if I decide to grow my business and expand my services?

Dot com? org? net? tv?

Select a .com name if possible because it signifies a top-level domain address that has commercial intent. If you really can’t find a suitable .com name, choose a .org or a .net version instead.

If you are doing business locally or within a set geographic area, you might want to choose a country-specific domain name like .uk.

I have a preference for purchasing .com addresses over .org or .net. Similar to the problem identified with misspellings, people may end up on the wrong website if they can’t remember whether your address ends in .org or .net.

Keywords

For SEO purposes, it’s good practice to incorporate relevant keywords within the domain name for your business. I like to use both the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Market Samurai to find suitable keywords to include in my domain name.

Pre-owned or new?

Just like a nicely aged wine, purchasing an “aged” domain can have distinct advantages over buying a new domain. Aged domains are already established and have had more time to get some good link juice with the search engines. You can trawl auction sites to find a suitable domain name, or try searching by entering a description of your “market” plus “domain for sale.” You might just snare a good one for a song.

More resources

I like using the following tools for the domain name research and buying process:

Domain name generators

A good method for generating ideas for domain names is to add a prefix or suffix to your keyword. This method generates hundreds of combinations of potential names that you can consider.

Experiment with the following domain name generators:

• NameBoy generates domain names based on entering primary and secondary keywords.
• Sedo connects buyers (who need a domain name) to sellers.
• NameStation generates domain words based on random phonetic names, suffixes and prefixes, and permutations.

Trademark research

Before purchasing your domain name, check to see whether it has any potential trademark issues.

• Tess – If you have a US business, visit the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s website and search their trademarks directory Tess.
• Likewise, for non-US based businesses, contact your local Government Intellectual Property or Trademarks Office to carry out a trademarks search.

Buying domain names

• Namecheap is great for registering your domain name at a price that won’t break the bank.

Discount coupons

• RetailMeNot will help you find a coupon code to use if you are ready to purchase your domain name.

Domain tools

• DomainTools is a handy tool to research information on your proposed aged domain. Don’t forget to carry out due diligence on your proposed purchase to find out its age, traffic statistics, page rank, and number of backlinks.
• Domain Samurai is a recently released tool from Noble Samurai that takes the pain out of finding a good domain name.

Summary

The selection of your domain name is an important step in launching your new business. With your brand and domain name selected, you are getting close to actually bringing your business site online.

What is effective advertising?

Once you’ve decided where you’re going to advertise, the next thing you need to prepare is the advertisement itself.

Since I don’t have any experience in television or radio, I won’t cover those platforms (although some of what I’m going to say may apply).

Text-only Ads

Ads that consist of text only (i.e. Google Adwords) work entirely different than image based ads. Here are some tips for maximizing your results:

Capitalize every first letter of every word. Although this may not be grammatically correct, it will help catch the attention of your reader.

Take a look at this example to experience what I mean:

Download Your Free Trial Now

compared with:

Download your free trial now

Google won’t let you throw on caps lock for entire words, nor can you use exclamation marks excessively, but they will allow you to capitalize the first letter of every word.

Ask a question. Instead of saying:

Lose 20 Pounds In One Week

try:

What If You Lost 20 Pounds in One Week?

Asking questions makes your advertisement a bit more personable and relatable.

Call to action. Make sure you include some sort of call to action in your ad. Whether it’s “Free 30 Day Trial Download” or “Sign Up Now” – if you aren’t asking your audience to do anything, there’s less motivation for them to click through.

Image Ads (web)

Image ads allow you to do much more than you can with text-only advertisements. Here are some tips for creating image ads:

Use negative space. Don’t clutter your advertisement with unnecessary images or text – having negative space can work wonders for your click through rate (CTR). Take a look at some of the advertisements displayed throughout the Fusion network to see what I mean.

Use nice fonts. If you aren’t quite the typography expert, stick with Helvetica or something fairly clean and simple. Choosing the wrong font can lower conversion rates, and effect the perception people have of your company. If the font is unreadable, nobody will know what you’re saying and your CTR will suffer.

Forget about reverse type for body text. It makes copy difficult to read. Use reverse only to emphasize short phrases.

It’s not a rainbow. Unless you’re selling rainbows (or your product has a multi-colour theme to it), try using 1-3 colours MAX. Having too many different colours throws off the viewer and, again, will lower your CTR.

Incentive. Give them a reason to click through. “Free Trial”, or “30% Off”, etc.

Logo or product? Depending on the ad size, you may only be able to fit an image of or related to the product/service you’re selling – OR your company logo. If you’re going after branding, the company logo is a better idea. If you’re just starting off, I’d recommend using imagery directly related to the product or service.

Image Ads (print/magazine)

While quite similar to image ads on the web, print ads differ in a few different ways. Here are some ideas for getting the most out of print ads:

Stand out. Take a look at the other advertisements in the same publication and do something to stand out. If they’re all in colour, try black and white. If they’re all crowded, try using a lot of negative space. If they’re all showing images, try doing something creative with typography. Most important of all, be different and provocative in what you promise to the reader.

Branding. Print ads can help you increase brand awareness. By showing up consistently in the same magazine for an entire year you’ll expose readers to your company repeatedly. They will be more likely consider your product or service when they come across it later (on the web, in person, on TV, etc.).

Incentive. If you want to track the traffic a print ad brings you to your website, you have a few options:

• Buy a new domain. Instead of listing www.nike.com in your print ad (we’re promoting new basketball shoes), try finding a domain like www.jumphigher.com – a domain that is only known to the people who see the print ad (make sure you hide it from Google).

• Offer a promo code. By including a particular (trackable) promo code, i.e. “jumphigher2010” you’ll be able to tally up all sales that came from the ad.

• Unique phone numbers are available (at decent prices as far as I’ve heard) whereby you can keep track of all inbound calls that have come from your print ad.

Some of these tracking methods can also be used to track the ROI of online advertising, but are especially important if you’re trying to track it with print ads.

Tracking your online efforts is quite complex – but the benefits are extraordinary. Once you know what’s working, you can stop paying for ads that aren’t. Then, you can try variations of what’s working, and reach even higher levels of ad performance.

Unless you’re literally measuring exact advertising-to-sales numbers, measuring ROI isn’t easy.

Since I’ve run out time in this article, we’ll talk about the benefits of advertising beyond web traffic and conversions in part three of “What’s the Deal with Advertising?”.

If I can leave you with one last tip – take a look at the big boys out there. If you’ve seen a text or image ad running consistently for a long time, chances are, it’s working.

Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with traffic, new paying customers, and increased brand awareness.

Do it wrong and you’ll be throwing money down the drain – and even worse, damaging your brand’s image.

Let’s begin with a couple of common questions:

Do I need to advertise?

The answer to this questions is always a “yes”, however yes doesn’t always mean now.

Online advertising costs money, and almost always requires testing before it will work to your benefit. If you’ve just launched a new company and don’t have the capital to spend money on advertising, don’t worry. If however, you never have a budget for advertising, you might want to question your business case altogether.

Where should I begin?

There are so many places to advertise that you could literally spend a lifetime figuring out where to start.

Here are a few networks that I recommend checking out:

• BuySellAds offers image (and more recently contextual) advertising on various niche blogs, with a heavy focus on the creative and design community. You can purchase ads for as little as $5/month (although I recommend start off in the $50+ range), so you don’t have to worry about overspending. They give you great analytics to let you know how your ads are performing (including A/B testing). I’ve personally had great success especially among creative’s and designers, with BuySellAds and highly recommend them to anyone just starting off. BuySellAds just recently celebrated their 2nd birthday – check out this blog post for an idea of what they’re all about.

• Fusion Ads is an “invitation only” advertising network that consists of established and high quality creative websites. You have to be invited to be a publisher in their network, which ensures only the highest quality of advertising. So why am I listing this? If you have a product or service that is of high quality (and if you don’t this article probably isn’t for you anyways), there’s a good chance it will be a great fit within the Fusion network (especially if it’s directly related to the creative and tech. industries). By staying “invitation only”, they’re able to maintain high relevancy and keep to their “We make advertising beautiful” methodology (unlike Google’s Adsense, where just about anyone can throw ads up on their website).

• Google AdWords can provide you with an endless amount of traffic. The problem is, because it’s so massive, it can be hard to use it effectively. I recommend starting with search traffic only (the ads you see when searching with Google), as opposed to buying ads through their content network (the Adsense ads you find on other people’s websites), and setting a low daily budget so you don’t spend more than you intend to. Start off with low cost per click bids – you can always increase them if your ads aren’t being displayed. Once you find something that works, you can scale up your budget, and try experimenting with new keywords. Google AdWords is definitely not a beginner’s platform, but there are plenty of resources out there to provide you with the groundwork to get started. AdWords is all about trial and error – the more you use it, the more you’ll become familiar with it and learn how to succeed. I don’t recommend doing this until you can easily throw away your entire ad spend without blinking (I wouldn’t start with anything less than $500/month).

• Facebook can also be a large source of traffic, but it’s also another beast that is incredibly hard to “tame”. Let’s face it – most people browsing Facebook are looking for a party, browsing their friends photos, or stalking a new co-worker (just kidding). However, if you can narrow down your targeting to the right people, there is a huge amount of web traffic awaiting you. Like Google, there will be a lot of trial and error.

• Private ad buying can be very effective. There’s no middleman, and you can often find better deals than going through a network. Try contacting a website that doesn’t have any advertisements on it – they may be willing to let you put a banner ad up for a significantly lower amount than a website with an established advertising history. A common downside will be that you’ll have to provide your own tracking, and handling payments isn’t usually as streamlined.

• Online media buys are probably the last thing you’ll get into – if you ever make it there. This is for the big boys. You can spend a million dollars in half an hour, and can send your website enough traffic that it will simply crash. You have to be ready for this on many levels – financially, customer service-wise, and from a technical perspective. Media buys can work wonders for branding, but I’d stay away from this until your company has been earning solid revenue for quite some time, and even then, consult a professional.

There are many other online advertising networks and platforms out there – just be sure you do the research and plan ahead before you dive in.

So now that you know you need to be doing some advertising, take some time to examine your current situation to establish a budget, some goals, and a time frame for getting started.

In part two “What’s the Deal with Advertising?” I’ll talk about tracking, ad creation, and the benefits of online advertising beyond web traffic and conversions.

I am by no means a professional advertiser, but I have been buying and selling online ad space for about 7 or 8 years in some form or another. Feel free to send me an email (address can be found on my Tumblr website) if you have any questions!

In either case, here are four mistakes that you’ll never want to make when working in PR.

1. Showing Up Late

Never be late. Let me repeat that: never be late. Whether it’s an appointment with a contact, a lunch date, a conference call, or an industry cocktail party, make sure you’re on time.

This isn’t a college party – showing up “casually late” doesn’t work. Every minute you’re late for your meeting will seem like ten to whoever is waiting for you.

If you are running late, make sure you call, text, email, Facebook, Twitter DM, or send a pigeon on your behalf to inform the waiting persons. Show them the courtesy you’d expect yourself.

Don’t be afraid to show up early, but don’t show up 45 minutes ahead of schedule. This will make things awkward for the people you’re waiting to see, and may make it seem like you have nothing better to do (or this is the only company that has given you the time of day).

2. Being a Textbook Talker

Scenario – you’re a waiter serving a bunch of tables at a middle-class restaurant and you have two tables. Table one is a group of four elderly women eating salads. Table two is a group of college guys ordering wings and beer.

Would you talk to these people with the same tone, mannerisms, and choice of words? Probably not.

The same applies when talking to other people and businesses. If you’re talking in person, it’s a bit easier to judge someone’s personality. If you don’t already know the person, it’s best to be professional. If you find out they’re a casual, humorous kind of person, be the same. If they’re something else, respond appropriately.

You can often pre-judge how someone will interact with you based on the company they work for – think of a Facebook employee vs. an employee of a law firm. But be very, very careful. Nobody has a one-dimensional personality. Someone can be a joker one moment and deadly serious another, depending on the circumstances.

Given today’s world of social networking, you can dig a bit (Twitter, Facebook if it’s public, LinkedIN, Flickr, etc.) to learn more about the person you’re going to contact. Have a common interest (i.e. cars), great! Bring it up in your first point of communication:

“Hey! Thought I’d reach out and contact you as a fellow sports car enthusiast, AND someone in the iPhone development community.”

This increases the chance of hearing back enormously. Even if they won’t be talking about your product or services, at least you can develop a relationship that may benefit you somewhere down the road.

3. Overtly Asking to Be Featured

Instead of saying:

“Hey, I was just wondering if you could review our product on your website”

Try something like:

“Have you heard about our product before? I’d be happy to send you some free stuff so that you can check it out.”

It’s generally best to avoid directly asking for coverage when reaching out to a media contact. First develop a relationship, find out if they’ve heard of or used your product/service, and then, and only then, see if they’re interested in writing a review.

It’s a bit of a touchy subject, but asking for a review can be made to seem less selfish (for lack of a better word) by doing things like:

• mentioning the benefit for them to review it (i.e. it’s something you and your audience would benefit from using)
• offer to include a giveaway (this helps the reviewer – contests generally increase web traffic and reader comments)
• point out similar media outlets that have already covered your product/service
• mention awards you’ve won or testimonials from other credible sources so that it seems like they’d be missing out if they didn’t cover you (i.e. if you’ve been on FOX then CNN would be missing out if they don’t talk about you)

4. Write Like a Kindergarten

When children start writing, their garbled spelling and mixed up sentences can be cute. It’s not cute, however, when you send a PR contact an email or letter full of typos and poor grammar.

The BIGGEST mistake you can make is to misspell the name of the person you’re contacting. Terrible. A close second is spelling the name of the company they work for incorrectly. With Google and Wikipedia at your fingertips, there are NO excuses.

Make sure to NEVER spell your own company name and product names, or services incorrectly, and never spell something two different ways in the same email. I’ve seen two and even three different spellings for things in the SAME email far more times than you’d imagine.

But What If I Screw up?

We’re all human, and we all make mistakes. The way you deal with your mistakes is what will leave a lasting impression with your contact.

A short apology and a bit of (humorous) self-bashing will usually do the trick.

Remember, when you’re doing PR, you’re not just representing your company – you’re representing yourself. You never know when you’ll run into old contacts in your future.

Public relations is an important part of every business, and it’s usually a good idea to involve experts when dealing with such an essential aspect. Let’s look at what’s involved with outsourcing this important part of your business.

To start, let’s look at some pros and cons:

Pros

• Less work: If you’re constantly busy and don’t have time to write emails and make phone calls, outsourcing PR may be a good idea. You may also feel your time is better spent doing what you do best, i.e. design, engineering.
• Particular skills: A PR company that has skills you or your team don’t have means they can do things you aren’t capable of (i.e. Google Adwords, although you can find specialized companies to do this).
• Relationships: If the PR company you’re thinking of hiring has a solid relationships with the media in your industry niche, they’ll be able to reach out to people you may have a hard time getting through to: For example, if they have an in at CNN, they may be able to get you featured in the Business section: If you’re a new, unknown company to CNN and you try to make the contact yourself, you probably won’t hear back from them.

Cons

• Cost: PR companies aren’t cheap – and if they are, they probably wouldn’t do much for you anyway. The money you spend on a PR company could be spent on advertising, networking events (trade shows, dinners, etc.) or additional employees, among other things.
• Tracking: If you don’t have the time, the means, or the knowledge to properly track the effectiveness of your PR company’s efforts, you may be pouring money down the drain. Google Analytics and Mint are good tools for monitoring web statistics. The iPhone application Ego can be used help you keep track of Google Analytics, Mint, and Twitter (as well as a few other popular services) when you’re mobile. You can also setup Twitter Searches to track word of mouth, and monitor Twitter from your favourite iPhone app (mine being Tweetie).
• Image: Because your PR company will be trying to persuade media folk to review and promote your product or service, you need to ensure the PR people are in line with your company image. If you’re a cool, young, hip company, all you need is your PR company to contact a blogger by beginning their email with “Dear Sir or Madam”. It may sound trivial, but aside from the fact that it can deter potential responses, it can change how a media contact will shape its review. If your contact with the media is super professional, their reviews are likely to be too. Just make sure your PR company is on the same page and that you know how it’s talking to the media.
• Strangers: Would you rather talk to a stranger or somebody you know? If you think a media contact has at least heard of your company before, he or she would probably rather hear from you than PR Company XYZ. Media folk usually would rather speak to someone on the inside as opposed to someone on the outside.

Of course there are plenty of other things – for example, if you can’t write very well, you don’t want to be emailing important media contacts yourself. People don’t respond well to improper grammar and typos (nobody’s perfect but if an email reads as though a kindergarten kid wrote it with chalk on your driveway, it’s not going to get a response).

Already have one?

So you already have a PR company – what to do? Monitor, monitor, monitor. Going purely on trust in this industry is not a good idea. Even if a PR company has a proven track record, it doesn’t mean they can do the same for you.

Google Analytics is free and fairly easy to understand. If you don’t already have it on your website, it’s probably the first thing you should install. From there you can explore other tracking tools (as mentioned above), but if you aren’t seeing the numbers you’re looking for, you need to speak up. If your web traffic doesn’t growing month over month, year over year, there’s a problem.

Make a list of things you want your PR company to achieve for you (or carefully examine the list they provide) and make sure it’s delivering on its promises each and every month.

No money for a PR company?

That’s OK! I recently wrote an article about making first contact with the media – that’s is a good place to start.

If you make a quality product or provide a service that is of great value, it shouldn’t be too hard to get noticed. If you can make the best product in your industry, you can sit back and watch the traffic flow.

PR isn’t everything but it needs to be done right.

When you’re low on cash you have to think differently

When you run your own business – be it web or otherwise – it is a general rule that you need two things to accomplish any particular task, money and time. A lot of one means you need less of the other.

If you had a lot of cash, you can just pay someone to do the work, whereas if you’re broke with all the time in the world, well…then you get creative.

In the case of publicity and traffic generation, a lot of money means you can advertise, sponsor and pretty much bribe your way to celebrity (or infamy). If on the other hand like most startups you are short on money or just plain stingy then you’ll need to take a different tack, for this situation you’ll need a bit of Guerilla Marketing.

So before you run out to the local zoo armed with placards and bananas, let’s do a bit of definition work. Guerilla Marketing is a term coined by author Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1982 book of the same name, and it simply means unconventional marketing and promotional activity on a shoestring budget.

The name comes from guerilla warfare not the gorilla ape, and is thus named because it’s a technique that is especially powerful in the hands of a small, agile business.

Without a large budget, your primary tools and assets will be time and imagination. Rather than competing you will need to cooperate and leverage off others to strengthen your own position.

Instead of buying your way in, you will need to create value for people in unconventional ways. In every case you will also mix up many different strategies to create your plan.

Instead of buying your way in, you will need to create value for people in unconventional ways. In every case you will also mix up many different strategies to create your plan.

Although every business and marketing situation will call for different and inventive strategies, here are some examples to get you thinking:

Using a feature of your product to get publicity for its innovation or excellence

When it came time to revamp the website for design agency Good Creative where I work, we thought long and hard about how to best use the design to market the site.

Since CSS design blogs are so popular, we built the site using lovely, clean, table-less markup. While this has other, obvious benefits it also led to the site being listed in numerous CSS portals and generated thousands of visitors.

Of course many of these visits were from designers coming no doubt, to pinch our ideas! But mixed in were many, many leads, and it cost nothing but a bit of extra time and care to make sure the design was done right.

Giving away something for nothing

There’s nothing that gets people interested quite like the idea of getting something for free.

A common application of this idea is to give away a free trial or a no-cost subscription, thus lowering the so-called ‘barrier to entry’ – the initial time and cost it takes a user to adopt or use your product.

While a free trial is a great thing to do however, it’s hardly Guerilla Marketing.

A more inventive idea is to really give something away. Take for example 37signals who gave away an entire framework in Ruby on Rails producing no direct, obvious profits, but creating huge reserves of public goodwill, a large cache of dedicated supporters and a damn lot of publicity.

Still we don’t all have frameworks to give away, at least I don’t.

As an example of something a little less grand, when Internet Explorer began having the “Click to activate” issue with Flash movies, the portal Kirupa.com created a little tool that let designers type in their Flash movie clip name and details and in return generated some JavaScript.

Not a particularly hard feat to accomplish, but for their target market it was very useful. As a result a legion of tech-shy designers would continually return to the site to use this tool giving Kirupa ample opportunity to entice them to use the site.

So what you give away can be simple, but it must be valuable. It might be a tool, free assets such as code or images, a set of tutorials or all sorts of other things.

As a well as being genuinely useful to your audience, it must also be totally free – not a ‘buy 5 and we’ll throw in a set of steak knives’, but actually free.

The gift of knowledge

Writing and speaking are great ways to gain publicity for yourself and by implication your product or business.

Naturally you will need to have something useful to say since no one wants to listen to gibberish. Nonetheless you will be surprised that what appears to be common sense to you, may be fascinating to someone else.

The key to this method is sticking to your field of expertise. You may need to supplement your own knowledge with a bit of research and a dash of reference, but by writing in publications, sites, blogs and/or organizing speaking engagements and giving seminars you will not only gain publicity but build credibility.

This may sound hard, but publications are often starved for good content and provided you write well and edit furiously there is no reason why you can’t get some work published.

Make Friends

That’s right, making friends isn’t just good for your social life, it’s great for your business too. After all if I had a penny for every time someone has said “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” then I’d have … at least 50 cents!

As a warning, I am not advocating you try to push superficial friendship on people who just don’t want to know you. What I am saying is get to know the people in your industry, attend events, join communities, do favours, help others and you’ll be surprised what benefits you reap.

Put on a show

Organising an event, exhibition or competition is a clever way of getting a lot of publicity, though of all the ideas mentioned thus far; this is by far the hardest and most time consuming, so consider warned. Still with great toil comes great reward.

Events such as conferences, seminars or exhibitions are fabulous as they are the sort of thing other people will want to publicise for you. If you can get through the stress of it all, you’ll gain credibility along with your publicity too.

Though you might think there is a lot of financial outlay to putting on a show, you can through the use of sponsors, entrance charges and so on even turn this into a profitable enterprise.

To Conclude…

These five examples should have gotten a few ideas popping in your head and I would encourage you to be as inventive as possible in your strategies. The possibilities and rewards for your efforts are large.

The best thing about Guerilla Marketing is that when executed successfully, it is a far more powerful way of reaching out to your audience than throwing advertising at them. For this reason, it may even be worth pursuing these techniques even if you do have the money.

I can’t say that it will be easy, heck I’ll straight out tell you that the more work, time and effort you are willing to put in the more successful you will be.

Just remember the key to Guerilla Marketing is to give people value, not perceived value, not run-on value, not discounts on your products, but real, genuine, bonafide value.

Do that and you will be successful every time.

When I first started blogging, I remember reading a post on Steve Pavlina’s blog about how much traffic he was receiving. If I recall correctly it was around a million visitors a month, a huge number! I found myself wondering where all that traffic was coming from.

Today while I was doing my routine sifting of Analytics numbers from Psdtuts+, I thought it’d be interesting to analyse and share some of the statistics and trends we have been getting. So I’ve taken some screenshots and put it all together for your informational pleasure!

Does Twitter ACTUALLY drive traffic?

Lately you hear an awful lot about Twitter and its uses for startups, bloggers and marketers. For about 6 months now we’ve been progressively using Twitter more and more, both through my own @collis account and through the various Tuts+ accounts. So does Twitter merit the fuss?

Here’s a monthly graph of referral traffic from Twitter:

As you can see it’s looking pretty positive, with a very solid climb over the last few months. And don’t forget this is just traffic coming marked as Twitter referrals, there is a large portion of traffic from Twitter clients which gets marked as Direct Traffic (for more on this, read Yoast’s post on the subject). So it’s safe to say that those numbers could be doubled to get a realistic quantity.

Part of the reason behind this trend is that our Tuts+ Twitter accounts – such as @psdtuts – push links to every post we publish. In other words it acts as a sort of alternative to RSS for the sites. Add in ReTweets, other users, our general Twitter marketing and you have a pretty good source of traffic by anyone’s estimation.

What about Facebook?

This one was more of a surprise to me because we don’t actually do anything with Facebook (yet). So to find out that Facebook is following pretty much the same traffic trend as Twitter was very interesting. In fact seeing this graph has spurred me to start organizing a genuine Facebook strategy for Envato. In the meanwhile I haven’t the faintest clue how Facebook is producing the traffic, just that it’s coming!

Digg vs StumbleUpon vs Reddit vs Foreign Social Media

For the longest time I used to focus a large amount of energy on Digg traffic. When it comes, it’s a real rush of visitors, and to be fair Digg really helped get many of our sites going, but have a look at this graph of Digg traffic over the years:

And compare it to StumbleUpon traffic:

StumbleUpon has actually sent double the traffic and it’s done so in a much more consistent manner. Add to that the fact that a lot of that Digg traffic took effort – running Digg campaigns, experimenting with widgets, growing a Digg account to submit with, networking with top Diggers, and so on.

We recently had the good fortune to land on Reddit’s homepage, something which I’d never seen the effects of before and I was pleasantly surprised to see traffic rivaling a Digg homepage – close to 40,000 visitors in a day. The thing I like about Reddit is that it’s much easier to get small amounts of traffic with an only slightly popular entry, whereas Digg by comparison is really an all or nothing traffic monster. Here’s the Reddit graph:

In terms of other social media, Delicious sends a fairly consistent stream of traffic – about 5,000 to 15,000 visitors a month. It spikes when a post goes on to the popular page, but even on a regular day seems to send a good 100-150 visitors, presumably from people accessing their bookmarks.

However the surprise (for me at least) entry in social media has to be foreign social sites. A good example of what I’m talking about is Wykop.pl, a Polish site:

And there are others too, one that springs to mind is meneame.net which one day suddenly sent 4,000 people.

Search Traffic

While social media is a great source of traffic, nothing beats search. It’s such a steady deliverer of visitors, have a look at this graph:

How does search traffic break down by search engine?

Google: 2,400,000 Visitors
Yahoo: 66,000
Live + MSN: 20,000
… Altavista: 500

What happened to Altavista! I still remember when it was the big engine that everyone used. Oh how the mighty have fallen. I’d imagine breakdown by search engine differs for niches and countries. Celebrity blogs no doubt have a much higher Yahoo percentage, as would sites in places like Japan and Russia where Google isn’t so dominant.

Another interesting thing about search is that when I look through the keywords people use, about 1/3 of all search traffic is for a variation of the site’s name – Psdtuts, Psdtuts.com, Psd+tuts, Psdtut and so on. So really these people are actually Direct Traffic – they just use Google as their address bar!

Search vs Direct vs Referral

Examining the overall breakdown of traffic into Search, Direct and Referral traffic reveals that Referrals win hands down bringing in almost 60% of all visitors. This breakdown differs with different types of sites. I’ve noticed that our marketplaces for example tend to weigh more towards search while a service site like FaveUp leans most heavily towards Direct traffic.

Referrals for Psdtuts+ come from such a huge range of sites that it’s hard to draw any real conclusions. We get a lot of traffic from tutorial aggregators, but that’s very niche specific. We also get traffic from a lot of blogs that do roundups of tutorials that themselves make it on Digg and StumbleUpon.

Proving that it’s always fascinating to look at stats, I discovered that one of our highest referrers is a site with a name rather similar to my own – Coliss.com which appears to be a blog in Japanese (I think).

Still More Traffic Analysis via Problogger

A few months ago Darren Rowse of Problogger posted an in-depth analysis of traffic to his Digital-Photography-School blog which is a fascinating read. And if that’s not enough, also check out The Day 250,000 People Showed Up at My Blog.