Best way to spend $350 on marketing?

magicmarcus

14 years ago

what products are you selling? what keywords or market are you after?

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hapkidoman 14 years ago

I sell certain items from around Asia. They are handmade and my competition is (give or take a fiew) relatively new - having started within the last couple of years.

The keywords i'm trying to rank for are not long tail keywords by any means. The competition is high but the keyword (and its variants) are only 2 words long.
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hapkidoman

14 years ago

The one thing i'm worried most about paying for the seolinkwheelers.com gold product is that i might only get up to page 3 on google - which wouldn't really help me much at all. I really need to be on the first page (don't we all) and understand that I can't expect that of the service - tho it may happen.

At least with the targeted ad I will know that the people most interested in my products can see it.

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SwiftStreams

14 years ago

do you have more information on the 40 day challenge?

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hapkidoman

14 years ago

Originally Posted by SwiftStreams

do you have more information on the 40 day challenge?

Ugh, I wish I could post a link on here (I'm too new) but basically, it was one person's goal to go from a new website to page 1 of google within 40 days for his twilightposterz.com site. He did it using a combination of article submissions and other SEO tactics. I feel that this is very similar to what seolinkwheelers.com offers to do.

If you search on these forums for "The 40 Day Challenge" I'm sure you'll find it.

Sorry I'm making you look for it.......

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hapkidoman

13 years ago

Does anyone have any suggestions/ideas? I'm at a loss for what to do, though I'm leaning towards going about it myself (to save money).

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eflo

13 years ago

I can't remember the startup fees, but I setup ShareASale for the company I work for, and they've made a positive ROI already.

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hapkidoman 13 years ago

I'll have to check that out. Thanks for the suggestion!
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Vogin

13 years ago

1. Buy Market Samurai ($149)
2. Go throught the WSO section and focus on SEO products ($50 max)
3. Buy War Room Membership ($37)
4. Go through The Challenge (free)

That's it.

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cesarsan

13 years ago

You can get MS for $97 after a seven days trial.

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Frank Donovan

13 years ago

Hapkidoman,

If you don't yet know what kind of advertising works for your market, I wouldn't recommend spending all the $350 - assuming that's your entire budget.

You should be able to test several methods for much less cost, and then ramp up the successful ones. Bear in mind, that a marketing budget is, in effect, limitless once you find your most cost-effective route. Your marketing spend would then simply become a percentage of your profits/cost of sales.

As far as what methods to test - given your time restraints, I'd be tempted to outsource the SEO work, starting slowly until you find your way. You could always supplement the link-building yourself, when time allows.

Probably the fastest way to test the effectiveness of your keywords and site conversions would be a PPC campaign, but there's a steep learning curve involved and you could easily blow your budget before seeing any meaningful results.

Frank

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hapkidoman

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Frank Donovan

Hapkidoman,

If you don't yet know what kind of advertising works for your market, I wouldn't recommend spending all the $350 - assuming that's your entire budget.

You should be able to test several methods for much less cost, and then ramp up the successful ones. Bear in mind, that a marketing budget is, in effect, limitless once you find your most cost-effective route. Your marketing spend would then simply become a percentage of your profits/cost of sales.

As far as what methods to test - given your time restraints, I'd be tempted to outsource the SEO work, starting slowly until you find your way. You could always supplement the link-building yourself, when time allows.

Probably the fastest way to test the effectiveness of your keywords and site conversions would be a PPC campaign, but there's a steep learning curve involved and you could easily blow your budget before seeing any meaningful results.

Frank

You make a very good point. The $350 was a semi-arbitrary number. It was how much I was willing (and able) to invest this month. I've experimented with PPC campaigns and they are good at getting traffic; however, I'm too new in the PPC realm to know quite what I'm doing and would prefer to focus on getting organic search results. I'm aware this will take much longer but believe it to be more viable in the long term.

I've definitley not given up on PPC, but just need to have a good weekend where I can sit down and learn how to do A/B testing and actually apply it.

Thanks for the awesome feedback!

Thanks

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hapkidoman

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Vogin

1. Buy Market Samurai ($149)
2. Go throught the WSO section and focus on SEO products ($50 max)
3. Buy War Room Membership ($37)
4. Go through The Challenge (free)

That's it.

Thanks for the link to The Challenge, I've not seen that before and will have to take some more time to look at it in detail. Also, I've seriously considering buying a membership to the War Room as so far, all the advice i've received has been very helpful.

Thanks

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Greg D

13 years ago

I think I am with Frank on this one.

You could get a FULL-TIME employee that you could train for close to 2 months for that budget!

If they could produce a profit in that time and continue to pay for themselves AT LEAST, then you caould have them fine tune what is working and scale it up.

But I would do the War Room Membership...no question.

Hit the forum for questions and participate as well.

'Luck' is the offspring of Preparation and Opportunity!

Best of 'Luck'.

Greg

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hapkidoman

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Greg D

I think I am with Frank on this one.

You could get a FULL-TIME employee that you could train for close to 2 months for that budget!

But I would do the War Room Membership...no question.

Greg

I'm assuming that you are talking about outsourcing the work to a vitual assistant in the Phillipines (or anywhere). I've thought about that, but was curious as to how effective they would be at SEO. Have you had good results using them?

Also, I'm definitely going to take everyone's advice and upgrade my account to include a War Room membership.

Thanks!

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mari456

13 years ago

In addition to all of this great advice, I would make sure I was listed on shopping sites like Yahoo shopping and Google product search...it's free. search on "google product search" to find it

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prodigaljoe

13 years ago

I don't think you should spend that much money on guides or backlink services if that is your budget. If you pm me the link then I can give you a few ideas how you can get some traffic.

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JonAlfredsson

13 years ago

I agree with what others posted here. It’s better to watch out the result of your marketing after training some individuals under your business. One of the applications that I recommend you should get is Market Samurai as it will not only help you monitor your site’s competitiveness but also your competition. The rest are learned by you and full time employees through online guides and of course warrior forum.

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hapkidoman

13 years ago

Originally Posted by JonAlfredsson

I agree with what others posted here. It's better to watch out the result of your marketing after training some individuals under your business. One of the applications that I recommend you should get is Market Samurai as it will not only help you monitor your site's competitiveness but also your competition. The rest are learned by you and full time employees through online guides and of course warrior forum.

Do you guys use Market Samurai on a recurring basis? It looks like it is useful for discovering niche keywords; however, I already have a good idea of the keywords I need. If I'm looking at selling physical products - not doing a new affiliate landing page avery 3 weeks - is it still worth the money?

Also, is this something you guys constantly use or just use once at the beginning of your research?

Thanks

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havplenty

13 years ago

If the CPC for keywords in your niche are quite high, then SEO won't be cheap either. Plus, meaningful results for SEO campaigns take time.

Either way, you don't appear to have a lot of time on your hands, so outsourcing will be your best option.

If you don't already have accounts with Adwords/Yahoo, why not sign up, get a few vouchers and run some test campaigns? This way you can measure bounce rate, conversions etc. It might even be a better idea to send traffic to a squeeze page, then redirect to the sales page. Also, don't forget to install some sort of tracking - getclicky is free!

Once you get a feel for how much it costs to convert a sale, then you can work out an efficient way to spend that $350.

hope this helps,

Hav

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George Phillip

13 years ago

All these SEO packages I see people purchasing are not a good investment. Building non relevant links that will ultimately not last long is not a good investment in my opinion(a very humble one at that). Don't pay for something you can do yourself.

With $350 I would concentrate on inbound marketing or atleast capture some leads, outbound marketing is less effective than inbound marketing, which Marketing Sherpa just did a recent study on.

For $350 I would purchase 70 adwords coupons with a value of $70 each(from a reseller), that would effectively be $1400 worth of adwords advertising. For $1400 worth of advertising,surely, you can generate a positive ROI, infact, you will, not you can, you will.

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tragictrip

13 years ago

Originally Posted by George Phillip

All these SEO packages I see people purchasing are not a good investment. Building non relevant links that will ultimately not last long is not a good investment in my opinion(a very humble one at that). Don't pay for something you can do yourself.

With $350 I would concentrate on inbound marketing or atleast capture some leads, outbound marketing is less effective than inbound marketing, which Marketing Sherpa just did a recent study on.

For $350 I would purchase 70 adwords coupons with a value of $70 each(from a reseller), that would effectively be $1400 worth of adwords advertising. For $1400 worth of advertising,surely, you can generate a positive ROI, infact, you will, not you can, you will.

Aren't Adwords accounts limited to only one coupon? What would he do with the other 69?

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George Phillip 13 years ago

Originally Posted by tragictrip

Aren't Adwords accounts limited to only one coupon? What would he do with the other 69?

Each adwords coupon requires 1 account.
I do PPC/Advertising for my SEO clients.
So for me, having 1 acct per client lets me test my techniques.

Now for a regular user limited to 1 account, I guess your options are limited. Unless you choose the other darker fork in the road.
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hapkidoman

13 years ago

Originally Posted by George Phillip

All these SEO packages I see people purchasing are not a good investment. Building non relevant links that will ultimately not last long is not a good investment in my opinion(a very humble one at that). Don't pay for something you can do yourself.

With $350 I would concentrate on inbound marketing or atleast capture some leads, outbound marketing is less effective than inbound marketing, which Marketing Sherpa just did a recent study on.

For $350 I would purchase 70 adwords coupons with a value of $70 each(from a reseller), that would effectively be $1400 worth of adwords advertising. For $1400 worth of advertising,surely, you can generate a positive ROI, infact, you will, not you can, you will.

Thanks for the advice! I wish I had thought of that before I started an Adwords campaign but mine is now several months old (it can't be older than 2 weeks to use a coupon) and I've already used a $100 coupon.

Any suggestions on if I can still use this tactic?

Thanks

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waken

13 years ago

If you already had your landing page with an optin, with good autoresponder already lined up for at least 7 msg (the more the better), then PPC is the best way.. it's fast, it's easy but you must do your keywords research properly.

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maymorgano

13 years ago

In my opinion $350 is not enough for any real campaign anywhere. If you do want to do some PPC, than go for the cheaper ones: Bing/Yahoo and even 7search. You will get traffic, but I don't know if it will convert well for you.

What I have learned is that if you keep on doing SOMETHING everyday to promote your website, and you keep on doing that every day for a few months, you will see results eventually. You can experiment every week with something else.
Lets say - one week for backlinks, one week for forum posts, one week for articles, two weeks creating videos
After a while you will know what works best for you
Good Luck

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1 reply

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hapkidoman

13 years ago

Originally Posted by maymorgano

In my opinion $350 is not enough for any real campaign anywhere. If you do want to do some PPC, than go for the cheaper ones: Bing/Yahoo and even 7search. You will get traffic, but I don't know if it will convert well for you.

What I have learned is that if you keep on doing SOMETHING everyday to promote your website, and you keep on doing that every day for a few months, you will see results eventually. You can experiment every week with something else.
Lets say - one week for backlinks, one week for forum posts, one week for articles, two weeks creating videos
After a while you will know what works best for you
Good Luck

Thanks for the advice. The principle is the same with investing (I studied Finance in college). Investing one large lump sum will not yield nearly the result as investing smaller portions, steadily, month in month out for years.

Any advice on creating youtube videos for products that you dropship and don't necessarily carry?

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japhyryder

13 years ago

Anyone got the link to the 40 day challenge?

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hapkidoman 13 years ago

Originally Posted by japhyryder

Anyone got the link to the 40 day challenge?

Sorry, i'd post the link, but I'm too new to do so. If you go to the top bar and search for 40 Day Challenge its either the first or the second link. It really is worthy your time.
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Exfilius

13 years ago

Originally Posted by hapkidoman

1. Pay seolinkwheelers.com $350 for their Gold Package (sorry, can't post links). This includes 74 do-follow links, 21 articles, 36 blog posts, 15 pr/articles sites (pr4-pr7), 2 youtube videos, all focused on 4 keywords.

Those links are not worth 350$. In Google's eyes they're garbage and won't give you good rankings.

Imo, you should spend your money on ads.

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hapkidoman 13 years ago

Originally Posted by Exfilius

Those links are not worth 350$. In Google's eyes they're garbage and won't give you good rankings.

Imo, you should spend your money on ads.

Yeah, from looking around the forums and reading other's suggestions, i'm pretty much leaning towards that direction. Thanks for your opinion.
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- 7SearchBrad 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by hapkidoman
  
  Yeah, from looking around the forums and reading other's suggestions, i'm pretty much leaning towards that direction. Thanks for your opinion.
  
  My name is Brad with 7Search and I would be glad to help you understand more about how our ppc program works and how it can benefit your marketing strategies. Let me know if you are interested, bstanley at 7search dot com. We are offering a $75 promo for all new advertiser accounts. Upon sign up in the second box below where you will select my name where it asks for promo code you will enter OCT2010. Let me know if you have questions. I look forward to the opportunity to serve your business.
  
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EBiz81

13 years ago

I think PPC would be pretty effective, but you should really understand it before you jump into it. You could also use article marketing. You can outsource the article writing rather cheaply. Doing this should help you rank even higher.