Comment on other sites

Stuffy Shirt

Where else can you market your merchandise?  Find other websites that are in a similar niche as your product.  So if you are a band, find other band or music websites that allow you to place a comment on their posts.  If you are an author, find other sites that deal with the subject matter of your book(s).  For instance, my Stuffy book is kind of heavily laden with sarcasm.  I would thus go to the 5 sites on the internet that are also related to sarcasm and join the conversations.  Not sure how to comment?  Relax, I have made a post on the Blogmaster General site teaching you how to comment on websites.

There is also a list of items you can do to market your blog on a later post on Blogmaster General.  Marketing your products is going to be one of the more difficult parts of these projects.  Mainly because most of us do not have a couple hundred thousand to flop down on a huge marketing campaign that includes TV and radio and print ads.  If you think TV is dead, then you have been reading the dead newspapers too long.  TV, although not raking in as much money as they used to, is still a giant medium in which to get a message in front of thousands of people.  The decrease in ad sales for TV has for some reason been inversely proportional to the number of reality shows on.  They have canceled shows that I thought had big followings such as My Name is Earl, and Samatha Who, but continue to show other programming that just isn’t that interesting.  Such as the I’m a Celebrity show – really?  Aren’t we using the word ”Celebrity” a bit loosely here.  Anyway bottom line is that you can still get in front of a lot of quality customers if you do your homework and have the budget.

I don’t have the budget to place a TV ad, what now?

Much cheaper options are the ones we will covering here.  When I say cheaper I really mean close to free.  These will involve time, and maybe small amounts of money.  Here are some of the things I am thinking about:

• Comment on other sites/blogs – as described above
• Twitter about your product, site, ideas
• Engage local clubs, go to local events related to your product
• Always have a card with your website on it, or copies of your product available and on hand
• Create a video (or several) and attempt to get them to go viral
• Create some Digg worthy posts to drive traffic to your site

Half of those ideas above are more broadcast marketing, and the other half are focused on niche marketing.  The niche marketing efforts, although smaller, should result in higher conversion percentage than the broadcast marketing.  Maintaining a mix between the two is going to be the best bet.

I will cover some of the other options and give you examples of how to do them in later posts.  Do you have any other ideas on how to market your product?

Mitch
It’s not merchandise, It’s Mitchendise

Follow me on Twitter – @ JohnnyOptimist
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