Some blog promotion tactics that are now obsolete

The year is now 2009 and we’ve seen an enormous explosion regarding interest in, number of and visitors to any thing social media related. Since 2003, there has been a coorestponding growth in blogging for profit. Professional blogging has become a reality for many and with this news, others are now striving for the same success. This has created a market for those who offer advice on techniques and strategies to make a living from blogging. At the outset, these two paths ran parallel and, to a large degree, separate from each other. Social media was not the prime means of traffic generation in 2003 and has only recently become a more popular means of getting visitors to a blog.

There are already quite a few ‘big time’ Gurus teaching the ins and outs of blogging and internet marketing but today, in 2009, many of those strategies are finding themselves obsolete. There are a few reasons for this:
a) The level of technical ability required has risen
b) The target audiences have become more sophisticated and able to discern real value from extrordinary claims
c) The advent of social media has been recognized as a powerful tool, but many well known ‘experts’ haven’t quite figured out an efficent way to use it
d) More ‘experts’ have entered the market and the previously established gurus are now less able to differentiate themselves
e) The economic recession has tightened up pockets and many of these teachers have pulled back to selling what has previously worked for them.
f) Because of this recession, many jobless people have decided to look into blogging for the first time. This means that the market for beginners has expanded, thus providing established gurus with no reason to look into more powerful tools.

Traditional methods are being used by more and more people and this diminishes the effectiveness. In addition, new social media tools obsolete those methods anyway because they provide a more powerful and time efficient means to not only reach, but expand the size of the market.

Below is a list of methods recommended by most, if not all blogging and internet marketing gurus. Next to the method, is a description of it’s benefits and weaknesses.

SEO Google,yahoo etc –

This has been the Holy Grail of traffic generating methods and has done a world of good for many upcoming websites that were able to speak to the algorhytms in a way that brought rankings up. Since the first recognition of Google as a search engine power and the first tales of SEO success, there has been an ongoing foot race between legitimite sites trying to get ranking, black hat SEO practitioners and the Google engineers who were busy trying to discern between the two. That contest continues to become more expensive, technically demanding and in many cases, less rewarding than other methods. All told, if you are just now getting into blogging or starting a new web property, you may like to put less emphasis on blog promotion via SEO and more on what can be achieved via other methods. Keep in mind that many blogging gurus claim they can get you ranked on page one for a given keyword. This might be true if that keyword has a monthly search volume of < 200, but such a ranking does very little to drive traffic.

Free downloadable e-book

- Distributing a free e-book is a fantastic way to promote your blog or site. If , as it should, it contains links to your site and its value propositions it’s like having a mini version of your web site distributed on hard drives around the world. Today, this is still a fantastic method but it is important to keep in mind that many sites offering free e-books fail to ’sell’ it. Thinking that since it is free it will be automatically downloaded is not correct. People now need to be convinced of the value of the content before downloading. Yes, this means fewer people may do a download, but they will be more qualified.

Add a signature to your emails

While common sense, many of these marketing conventions, meet up with ‘blindness’ after a period of time. This is similar to the ad blindness that Google adsense suffers from. Similar to the free e-book, what preceeds the signature, the email content, is what will get the click.

Autoresponder

Saying you need this is like saying you need a computer. It is still essential.

Exchange links with other websites

– This method is starting on its way out. It has always been time consuming to send and respond to emails as well as set up links (real estate) with other people. If we could all exchange links with someone who gets more traffic the investment could work wonders. What is more likely is that a great deal of email gets sent out and little in the way of linking occurs. Think of it this way, if your material is compelling enough, people will link to you without being asked.

Exchange banners

- A banner is a big piece of real estate. With the growth of affiliate marketing, that space can be better used a) As part of your sales funnel or b) To add value to your website. We are in an age now where free value supplied by blogs/sites (Which are really marketing channels), precedes the sale. A banner ad does more for the person who’s ad it is and less for you the blogger.

Forums

– This is another time intensive activity. Do the math, 5 threads on 5 forums = 25 posts. If the forum is busy, your post gets pushed off the first page quickly. Social networks and applications can keep your messages closer to the front page for a longer period of time and to a more static group of people, rather than the random visitor. By having a friend network, you prequalify visitors.

Submit articles

This used to be a good idea because the means to access large numbers of people was limited to big blogs and Google, again social networks make accessing a large audience much easier, so it is now much better to develop an identity, trust and path to your content via headlines. The phrase ‘SEO methods’ will get a different number of clicks depending on who the broadcaster is.

Directories

– Blog directories, there are thousands of these and submitting to even a fraction of them is impossibly time consuming. Even if you employ automation like roboform, you’ll be spending far too much time. That isn’t the main issue, however, what is most important to realize is that the Internet is moving toward a real time model where people can view a stream related to their interests and find out what is happening now rather than dig through a herarchy of sites and sub-genres.

Create a google, yahoo

etc group – The groups model is another that may fall away to real time groups. This is because people are gradually starting to expect information that is more current. The pace of the Internet’s economy is only going faster and readers are now finding themselves scanning for content that is both rich and timely.
Software to analyze groups for frequency of posts, # of users and frequency of visitors.

Participate in Yahoo answers

– Because of social media sites like Twitter, the turn around time for a given question is much faster than it was even 6 months ago. As these services become more popular, people will look first to more dynamic systems for answers, particularly for anything in a rapidly changing industry.

Stumble upon and other social bookmarking sites

Submitting your posts to the hundreds of social bookmarking sites is, again, too labor intensive. What’s worse is that this kind of work does not add value, it is only repetitive labor. Other tools are starting to emerge that enable broadcast over a collection of sites.

Join traffic generating sites like trafficswarm.com

– Sites like this cost money to use and are stable but because they have been identified as valuable services, there are now free competitors available. Look for these first.

Regularly comment on other blogs

Another time consuming endeavor that has become so popular that simply leaving a comment is not enough. The comment must stand out above the others and provide additional value. You may even have to provide a series of comments over a range of a given blogs articles to get noticed. Contrast this with developing a following and trust via a social network and the sending out of a single update/headline and you’ll see that the latter has a wider range of possibilities.

Offline methods

Submit free articles to paper mags, newspapers

– Paper publications are way down in circulation and in many areas not even seen as up to date. Advertising here in many cases is like advertising that you are behind the times.

Joint venture, friends promote your site

– This is still effective if you can manage some cross pollination with a site or service that is complimentary and doesn’t directly compete with you. Having a good working and trust relationship in a field related to or supporting your niche adds value to your own site.

PPC

– With so many new bloggers entering the arena, the price for keywords will go up. In addition, the ROI must be split amongst more bloggers.
Build up a list to send them to your site – This will always be a good idea, what is obsolete are previous methods of getting an email address. More value must be offered up front to entice someone to opt-in

Youtube

This is where things are going. Video continues to become easier to produce at a high level while at the same time, viewer demand for USEFUL content is rising. This means that even without high prodution values, you can do well. With more time spent on editing and effects, your viewership will take off even faster.

Myspace

dead,dead, dead This site is the signature of all that is wrong with the Internet’s early phase. Poorly organized, difficult to navigate, no standards, fickle crowds and tons of unqualified leads.

In summary, it is now time to re-think how you allocate your time with promotion. Always take time to look for more efficient methods to distribute your message. One of the biggest trends, aside from the huge growth in affiliate marketing that is underway, is the reach that each of us can gain without dependency on search engines. The range and variety of marketing tools will continue to expand and looking for alternatives is now an essential marketing component.

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