Online Marketing Experiment

May is over. It is time to start evaluating my actions, and make decisions for the month of June

We have achieved our primary goal, which was to measure interest. We’ve jumped from over a million in the Alexa rankings, to just over 500,000. Now to be honest with you that really means nothing to me.

What’s more important to me, was to find out, using articles, what level of interest there was in the golf niche

To put it simply I wanted to measure traffic. Here’s the thing, without traffic you have nothing. You need traffic to test, and you need enough traffic in order to test properly.

We needed to know first if it would be possible to get traffic in this competitive niche without loosing our ass and if so how much?

Example, if you only get 100 visitors a week it will take you a considerable amount if time to test or just as importantly make a sale.

What I needed to find out was the following, would the articles I wrote get a lot of page views? Is the market I am going into too small? This we needed to find out before we preceded to invest more time & resources into this project.

The fact is we’ve proven that there is enough traffic and there is enough interest and now we face the uphill battle of conversion.

In actual fact we sent out some really crappy videos, we were not looking for perfection, in actual fact I learned to quickly get over perfection.

The goal instead was to take action, because by those very actions we could measure response. More importantly we could look at the subject matter of those videos and determine where to put more effort in - or just as importantly where not to put as much effort in.

Just like the articles we wanted to see how many views the videos would get and which ones would get the most? Which topics were of interest to the audience?

Once we found a winning video, as in how many people viewed it, we could then up the production quality to improve the traffic generating objective of that video. In addition we could now also start testing the message.

Because we have a testing engine in place that will track what a visitor does when they land on our web pages, we can move to ramping up traffic and looking for tell tale patterns relative to what is on those pages.

Now that we can get traffic we are in the driver seat, its time to pump it up and get as mush data as we possibly can so we can figure out what’s not working……. and what is, as quickly as possible.

Then when we have enough data, start sharing it with those of you on the list.

This month we will start split testing landing pages.

Last month we did 98 articles, we did some social book marking, we did videos, forum marketing, we got listed on directories, we did a Press Release and made posts on other blogs.

We have sold some product and we’re very happy about that, but the truth is, the return on investment at this moment is quite honestly terrible.

But just like any venture, we got the hard part out of the way, and that is actually taking action.

Going out there when you know that you’re writing skills aren’t very good, when you know that the video quality is poor, the production weak, it can be tough… however you don’t have to let that stop you, instead you just go out and do it, you take the hard knocks, you take the criticisms.

In addition you deal with the doubts that you have, you deal with the fear that creeps into your mind every day wondering if you’re doing the right thing?

That’s probably the hardest part of any journey, the part where you have to get of your rear end and face the music.

But one thing I’ve learned in life, which relates back to the test blog… and why it took me so long to let it out there, is this.

You will never get it perfect and if you fail to take action you will never get it right.

In actual fact perfection in my humble judgment is a “myth” and it is the very myth that prevents the masses from getting anything done, which relates back to the fear of failure.

In actual fact that is why so many fail to test their efforts because testing in effect exposes failure and in my next post I am going to go a little deep on this topic.

Kinda funny but I may go off the deep end, but don’t worry I will swim back. Now again you have to let loose, you have to run with it and put your heart out there.

See you on the next one, by the way we will be providing test results real soon to those of you patiently waiting.

Best Wishes
Paul

As always I will to start out with the Roadmap. The reason I do that is because the Roadmap is really important. Effectively the Roadmap keeps me on track. It tells me what is going on in relation to achieving each objective for the month of May.

So here is what has taken place over the last few days. The press release has been held up again due to the fact that HTML coding is not allowed in the body of the press release.

However they do offer other formating which we are working on. I’m just working out the details with their support. The reason why this is so important is due to the fact that we need to track the links coming back to a specific landing page.

This will help identify that the traffic is coming from that press release. In addition we will be in a position to see what that traffic does once on the site.

As mentioned marketing can be challenging and the objective is to understand each step we take and know what results are achieved from those steps.

As always I start each day with content creation. That begins with blog posting and writing articles. As mentioned I will outsource X amount of articles in this case 40 articles for the month of May. I reduced the number because I want to focus on conversion and then once we get that right we can ramp up the traffic to the test site.

I’m writing one article a day for this specific niche. In addition I then take the content from the Blog Post and write 2 other posts and submit them to other blogs linking back from different IP blocks.

I am also using a free tool to find blogs and post back to the test site. As mentioned when results come in I will supply those results to those of you on the list.

I am just dealing with one forum at present. But there has been some breakthroughs which have been very interesting. That I will go into in another post.

As for the HTML site I will do 2 more videos to explain what’s going on with that. I will go over the positives and negatives of that site.

Video syndication is proving to be challenging at this point because the software is having configuration file problems. So I’m still trying to resolve that. I have made them aware that I want to test the software and get results back by the end of May.

In addition I’ve done more follow up e-mail videos and also created a video for a landing page for our own mini report. The goal as always is to test the viability of this technique and to test selling our own product in this niche. Thats we are starting with a mini report so as not to devote too much resources while testing.

On another post I will show you how I integrated pictures into an open office Power Point presentation.

I will also discuss more in relation to blog posting on another post.

I will also begin to cover Cickbank.

See you on the next post

Best Wishes
Paul

I am quickly going to break down what is going to be coming up over the next few weeks.

This is basically how we are going to role it out.

The key reason to all of this is to test and experiment and report the results whatever they may be.

I do not have unlimited resources, so when I do each task I will outline the length of time it took me, this way you will have an idea what it would take you, if you were to do it.

I will also tell you what tools I used, if any.

On the next video I will share the marketing plan which I will follow.

I will share what niche I am going into on the next video, it is a competitive one, but the purpose of the experiment is to test to see what can be achieved in a competitive niche.

Personally being that it is an experiment, I wanted to make the challenge difficult to see what results can be achieved.

The following day I will go through how to upload Wordpress and what plugins I use

The next day after that I hope to have both sites ready to go, and will start with task A on the marketing plan.

At which time I will then tell you my goals relative to each task and how I will implement it.

I will also show you what research I do etc.

Then as tasks are completed report back to you what it took to implement- and how long the task took me to do.

Lastly keep you updated on the results relative to each task that I undertake.

At the end I will reveal all the results that were achieved.

During that time I will also show you how I use Adwords as a marketing research tool.

How I leverage article marketing.

Where I go to get my articles written - when I need them.

How much I pay for those articles.

Some tips for cutting costs.

How I do keyword research.

Which free tools I use.

Which paid tools I use.

Tests from other sites that we put up for auction.

How I do social marketing, most of this I learnt from 30DC “Thanks Ed and the gang, leftcoasters etc” that is with a slight variable.

I will show you what I did differently with each site and what that achieved.

In conclusion, we all know that these are tough times; many people are entering the make money market in order to try and make ends meet - and often – unfortunately, are desperate for a solution. When folks are desperate, poor decisions can be made and that is essentially what you want to avoid.

I sincerely hope this information no matter how it works out will be of benefit to you, and maybe I will be able to save you some time, money and frustration when it comes to building your own venture online.

The results may not be what we desire them to be but at least they will be factual based on the actions taken.

If any of you have ideas and want to share something that could benefit others, please do so. On the flip side we do not want blatant promotion.

The point to all this is to share and assist one another in order to build a venture online.