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Other, Off-site Marketing

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Creativity. That’s the one-word explanation of this category. In the offline world, there are unlimited ways for us to market our products using creative methods such as bumper stickers, skywriting, and even the occasional logo-shaved-into-a-hairdo. The nature of this category will always be limitless, both online and off.

HOWEVER, since we’re only representing the on online in our strategies, and the internet is relatively new (in the scheme of things) we really haven’t had a chance to come up with infinite creative advertising techniques yet.

One technique has been around since the start of the net. Banner ads. I remember seeing my first one and thinking that the advertising ‘fad’ would pass… Oh well. Nowadays we all detest those stupid things and MIT heat maps (results of an eye-tracking test) show that they are almost completely ignored. In fact, that’s why Google’s contextual ad program, AdSense, was born years ago.  

Still, some of them are in different shapes and sizes, or in creative pop-ups that grab our attention, so they remain, and probably will keep evolving for years to come. Webmasters simply exchanging ad space fits perfectly in this realm too.

Contextual Ads like big G’s AdSense, Yahoo!’s Search Marketing program, and a flurry of other context-matching ad programs are all the rage these days, because they have a much higher click ratio than any one ad could. This craze has even allowed the creation of a whole industry; the AdSense Publisher, also known as the VRE owner or ad farmer. We’ve dedicated a whole assembly line based on this industry… An industry which never could have thrived while clink-thru rates were down where they were with banner ads. (Think: mid-1990s)

Since there is another sub-category for Contextual Ad Helpers under the website building category, we won’t deal with AdSense directly here though, except to offer some alternatives.

Those are the major players, but being an unlimited category, I’m going to shove lots of great little ways to market your product off-site here too.

Posting about it in a forum is one of the best ways. I’m not talking about placing an ad at the top of the page, that’s just like buying ad space. Nor am I addressing the value of a link to your website from it being in your signature at the end of your forum postings… That’s a link-building tactic, which helps a website’s ranking, but does little to sell your product.

I’m talking about visiting a forum on your niche topic, replying to someone’s question with an answer that includes your product. Simply placing a big ad in a forum post will get it deleted faster than you can say “moderator,” but if it is a relevant answer to someone’s question, then everyone reading the post should genuinely be thankful that you supplied a solution.

In fact, this tactic works so well now that I know of THREE different software programs that help facilitate this process, so you can crank out tons of these posts every day. (See the bottom of this page for details)

There are also some great marketing tools like Instant Buzz, FreeTrafficBar, and Desktop Lightning, among many others, that allow you to trade something like an ad-for-an-ad, shown on your browser toolbar or on a desktop-pop-up application screen. We’ll be handling those guys in the marketing center; I don’t even want to include them here because of the sheer complexity of them all.

Finally, there are email newsletters, spam, and ‘safelists.’ Newsletters we’ll cover in the list-building category, and the final word on spam is just stay away from it, at all costs. Lawsuits and/or prison just isn’t worth the ability to annoy your 10 million closest friends.

Safelists, however, work just like the toolbars mentioned above, only in the format of emails that nobody will ever read. Since I find them completely useless AND annoying, you won’t see any coverage of those here, but if I ever would mention them, this is where they would be covered. :p

That’s about it, at least for December 2006 as I write this. Just keep in mind that if any category is likely to grow due to the latest trends I marketing, this is your best first stop.

In fact, you may want to -Bookmark this page (CTRL+D)

Forum Equalizer- The undisputed king of this arena, Forum Equalizer is the best product to date at helping you find & post to forums that will get you both attention and backlinks. It lets you search by keyword for your niche, subject, or topic, and then makes it super-easy to log in, (while it remembers your password for next time) find a place to post and then do so. You can leave tons of posts out there every day, without even breaking a sweat.
Drawback: Just the price tag, but there’s no real competition so it’s worth it.

Comment Hut - This innovative new software does everything for you as well, but it’s not for forums… It’s for BLOG Comments! (Completely overlooked until this came along.) They’ve actually gotten this piece of software to do everything that forum equalizer does, such as find relevant topics by keyword, keep up with passwords, and post to it, etc… But for five different blogging platforms. (Wordpress blogs, Wordpress.com blogs, Drupal blogs, LiveJournal blogs, & Typepad blogs.) 
Drawback: What, no Blogger? Oh well, always room for improvement.
Click here to download the FREE light version!

Forum Fortunes - Russell Brunson’s solution to automating forum posting, this software is very powerful for a Master Resell Rights product. There is one drawback, however, it doesn’t have a way to FIND the forums… You supply those yourself, but this thing does a great job at automating the posting procedure by storing posts and facilitating the process of getting them into the page quickly.

Unfortunately, It appears that Mr. Brunson has taken down support for this software, and I can no longer find a copy of it for you. (My copy was not a resell rights version, but I do believe they exist out there.) If you google "Forum Fortunes" you'll likely find a copy but I doubt anyone has it for free at this time.  

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