Kiss WebX.0 Kiss Internet

As promised in yesterdays post this article will discuss the key elements of the BlogStorm marketing campaign and how you can apply the same techniques to build links to your site.

Phase One: The Prelaunch
Before your website is viewed by anybody you need to ensure that you have something remarkable. The key aspect to BlogStorm is the link tracker tool which is used by hundreds of bloggers to track links to their blog posts. The tracker gave BlogStorm a unique hook that separated it from all the other internet marketing blogs competing for attention.

We have a lot more tools in testing and hope to launch those within the next few months but the tracker was designed to establish the focus of BlogStorm as a location for bloggers to learn about linkbait and using social media.

In addition we took the time to create a visually appealing design without too many ads. The template also has been fully search engine optimised with unique titles and meta tags and no duplicate content or low value pages.

The code is custom created and designed to be very light on the server. This is important as it means the site can stand up to a front page Digg with no problems at all (it did get a bit slow under the load of 50,000 uniques in 2 hours).

Phase Two: Content
The first four posts on BlogStorm:

Welcome to BlogStorm
How can we improve?
How to use hotlinkers and Google Images to build natural links to your site
Advanced use of Google Analytics and the new interface
The first posts on a new blog set the tone for the rest of your posts. If a reader notices that the posts are low quality then they are unlikely to return to read some more. Usually I work on the principle that if the writer is posting useless tips they are not suddenly going to start posting amazing content.

The Google Analytics Tutorial was quite an in depth article and is useful to most people who run a website. It was written some time ago and then had to be re-written from scratch when Google changed the interface. This turned out to be fortunate as it helped the article gain traction in the social media sites as it was one of the first in depth tutorials concentrating on the new interface.

Phase Three: Launch
The first step is to email your friends and ask them to blog about your new site. It is important to start with the people you think will help you and then work down the list from there. In my case I also contacted famous bloggers with a personal email and ended up being featured on several large blogs resulting in 30,000 visitors in week 1.

There really is no secret to launching a site, its all down to market timing, a good product and hard work.

The key steps are:

Email friends
Email anybody who might be interested (make it personal)
Use social media
Leverage your reputation
Phase Four: Make your readers happy
After you launch a new site it is very tempting to keep churning out linkbait articles but most of your readers don’t want to read this kind of content. I try to limit the linkbait to one post per week on BlogStorm and make sure the rest of the content is actually useful. Of course sometimes good content is also great linkbait which is a win win situation.

Phase Five: Linkbait
If you dedicate one post per week to creating a really strong piece of linkbait your readers will actually start to look forward to it and will welcome your post. Some might even help you seed it on social media sites.

The key aspect in promoting the linkbait articles on BlogStorm was using social media such as StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg etc.

Other good linkbait hooks we used were shouting about our traffic and links. John Chow gets traffic because he earns lots of money from his blog, BlogStorm sometimes gets traffic because we tell people how many links we got via linkbaiting and how much traffic each bit of linkbait sent to us.

Phase Six: Reputation monitoring
Monitoring your reputation to see what people are saying about your brand is important for any blogger but for a new blogger it is vital. You need to respond quickly to criticism and take action.

Phase Seven: Quality content
When you look past all the self promotion and linkbait articles it is important for a blog to produce quality posts on a regular basis. I like to think anybody reading BlogStorm has a chance to learn something new each week that will help them promote their sites.

Without good marketing nobody would ever find a blog. Without good content nobody will stick around to read it.

Earlier this week we started a poll on what online marketing tactics our readers would use most in 2008. The polling plug-in allows for only one choice and over 100 people have responded so far. We’ll keep the poll running for another week or so, but here are the top ten tactics rankings so far out of 35 listed and the percentage of votes for each.

With the vote count at over 150, I’ve updated the top ten as of 02/13/08:

Blogging (27%)
Email marketing (16%)
Search engine optimization (14%)
Pay per click (9%)
Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (5%)
Blogger relations (4%)
Online public relations (3%)
Viral marketing (3%)
Free content (white papers) (3%)
Corporate web site (3%)
The original top ten are here from 02/05/08:

Blogging (25%)
Search engine optimization (14%)
Email marketing (12%)
Pay per click (8%)
Blogger relations (6%)
Online public relations (5%)
Viral marketing (5%)
Corporate web site (4%)
Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (4%)
Webinars/Teleconference (3%)
Blogging really does make sense because it can serve as a platform for so many other tactics including SEO, email (archiving newsletters), blogger relations, PR, viral marketing, a compliment to the corporate site, a touchpoint for social networking and a place to promote webinars.

If you’re a company doing business and/or marketing online and aren’t using a blog in some way, you’re really at a disadvantage. The longer a company goes without a blog of some sort, the greater an advantage their blogging competition will have. Of course, not ALL companies need to have a blog, but the number of qualified reasons not to is getting smaller each day.

I am happy to say that of the top ten tactics listed, TopRank specializes in the top 3 (blog marketing, SEO and email marketing) plus several others.