Are You Ready to Try Something New?

Another new year, another new start and deciding what you want from the next 12 months. So why not try something new this year to promote your website?

There’s a whole load of stuff out there that you can do, but make it your resolution to try one new thing this year. We’re going to do the same and will let you know via our blog how we get on – read on to find out what we’re going to do and of course, practice what we preach!

1. Start a blog
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last couple of years, you’ll know how popular blogging has become. Blogs are now more than just online diaries or journals where people can post their thoughts and comments on a particular subject. Such is the technology that many blogs are now as good as many websites with a huge amount of functionality. The added bonus is that many of them are free to set up – so no excuse not to try. Readers of Marketing Karma know that I have a blog that I’ve been running for about 15 months now on Blogger, but my resolution is to try out the Wordpress blog and host the blog independently from Wordpress. I’ll let you know how I get on with setting it up and trying out all the functions that can be added.

2. Post on forums
Forums have been around for years and are very popular. Not only can you find answers to questions on a particular subject that you may have, but they’re a great way of getting yourself known within your industry. If you regularly post and answer people’s questions you’ll soon find yourself being known as an expert in your field. We’ve posted on forums but probably not enough, so this is another resolution – post more often on forums!

3. Target Communities
Really this is linked with 2 above, but yet another way of interacting with people who have the same interests. Social networking is becoming big business and sites such as Facebook and My Space are being actively targeted by businesses, not only to find out what’s being said about them, but to interact with communities and perhaps present themselves in a different light. We’ve not done much in the way of social networking ourselves, we may dabble in it, but know that once we get sucked in we’ll probably end up spending hours on these sites instead of doing what pays the bills!

4. Online PR
Whether you’re promoting a product of service, PR can give great returns. Not just the traditional PR of articles or product placements in magazines either. Online PR should be a part of your online marketing mix. Get your article or content on other websites, have your products placed on popular consumer or business sites, manage your reputation with blogs and make sure you know exactly what’s being said about you. A good way of doing this is using Google’s News Alerts. If your PR company run regular campaigns for you offline, make sure these are translated online as the links that you’ll gain from them will be some of the best quality links you’ll get.

5. Earn more money from your website
This is something else we’re keen to try out more this year. Some of you may have noticed that we’ve put Google ads on the Marketing Karma website (and yes, we’ve earned a bit of money from them), and have put links to Amazon from our recommended books page. We want to do more extensive testing of adsense and other advertising models when we get our Wordpress blog up and running, so will keep you posted on that too!

Realistically, you probably have a very limited amount of time to try out everything that we’ve mentioned above as many of these activities are quite time consuming, but promise us that you’ll try out at least one thing and see if it makes a difference to your leads and sales, and your bottom line.

Category: General Online Marketing