Don’t Forget The Other Traffic Sources

“We tried Google, we failed with Bing, Facebook didn’t give us anything, and neither did Twitter or PPV. Online marketing doesn’t work.” That’s what a new client of mine said about 20 minutes before I landed a consulting gig with them.

When you do marketing, and yes, I’m going to give you the most boring cliché ever, but YOU HAVE TO “think outside of the box.” Be creative, do something others aren’t doing.

So I asked them, “Did you try any other paid traffic sources?” And the answer was: “Are there others?” This shows how little business owners know, even though they think they’re experts, because they read an article on PPC or Facebook marketing. Being an expert doesn’t mean you know the technical terms, it means that you’ve spent 10 000 hours doing something.

Long story short, they agreed to try some other traffic sources, although I can guarantee if they would let me try AdWords, I would make that campaign way more successful than what they did, but they won’t let me, because they “lost all confidence in AdWords at the moment.”

I signed an NDA, so I can’t show you guys their product or service, but I’ll keep you updated on how everything goes. Here are a couple of things they have agreed to try:

1. A press release and distribution – I always do this, and I use PRWeb (not an affiliate link). There are hundreds of similar sites, but I just like that one the best.
2. Improving their presence online, start blogging, social bookmarking and utilizing Facebook and LinkedIn, since that’s where their target demographic hangs out.
3. I’ve had some great success with niche products and buying traffic from StumbleUpon, and I’m going to give it a try for these guys. Some great content will be created for a free giveaway, and then the subscribers will be contacted by the sales people.
4. This is a product/service that just might work for a CPA network, so if we put it on one and it takes off, we’re golden.
5. Media Buying. Those big scary words. I’ve found some potential sites and I’m having some great banners designed, and I think this will be the most scalable solution if it works.

If you’ve run out of ideas, I suggest you take a look at the “Top 50 Ad Networks To Explore”, and find out where they advertise and how. There are a million other sources, but you gotta start somewhere. I’ll keep you updated, and I’ll try to post more “real life scenarios” from my clients. Perhaps even get permission to do an open case study, we’ll see.

Until next time!