There are a lot of books, articles and sites out there geared towards marketing a small business. That's great stuff! you may need them someday, but how do you get that initial traction from ZERO hits? A word of mouth marketing program is perfect to get the ball rolling! But how do you begin?
1. Introduce yourself to the influencers.
The web is full of vocal people that will evangelize what they love and campaign against what they hate. They have blogs, podcasts, LiveJournals, MySpace pages. People really do follow recommendations from influencers.
It's not hard to get great results here if you do your homework. Browse communities, forums, podcast directories and seek out the people with the best audience. Introduce yourself as someone who is working on your own to making something that you think is pretty great, but you need a little help getting the word out. It never hurts to ask if there's anything you can do to help them out. You'd be surprised how many bloggers and podcasters could use a bit of web work, for instance.
2. Become a direct member of the community.
This one is dead simple. If your site targets the MySpace crowd, join MySpace and start connecting. If your site sells BMW parts, post to BMW repair forums. Participate in commenting on successful blogs in the subject area.
You will become an influencer in your space as well as convince other influencers that you are worthy of their praise. It's extremely hard to be effective in your space without making those direct connections.
3. Blog and Submit.
If you have the talent and the time, writing about your subject area can prove to be and effective source of customers. In the same vein as #1 and #2, you will increase your influence by becoming a trusted source of information in your area, or one closely relate. What's important is that you produce truly valuable content for your target audience.
You can driving some traffic to your blog by submitting your articles to social networking sites such as digg, del.icio.us, etc. Dig in a bit and see what social bookmarking sites best serve your blog. Of course, don't be afraid to promote your articles on the forums, newsgroups and other blogs that you are participating in. As long as your content and posts are relevant to the subject matter, you'll do well.
4. If you have a little money, do some hyper-targeted advertising.
This can mean a lot. For instance, when I launched Gimme Gimme I Want (www.ggiw.com), I signed up for a two day run of "Facebook Flyers", targeting schools that were a good fit. The click-through rate on the ad was excellent to say the least. That click-through success came from one simple fact: I put something highly appropriate in front of the right eyeballs.
If you can do some highly targeting advertising like this, it may help you out. Bear in mind, however, that people clicking ads are really not your best audience. Word of mouth will always do better. For GGIW, for instance, we saw about 30x higher sign up rates based on evangelist LiveJournal posts when compared to the Facebook ads.
5. Take care of your new users and make them evangelists.
Once you have some folks sign up for your service or buying products from you, treat those first few people like they're made of gold (because they are!). Reserve something special for them. Send them surprise schwag in the mail. Give them a free premium service. Don't be afraid to ask them a question or thank them directly, personally, via email. These are the folks that already believe in your product, so make them feel special (because they are).
So, you can use these tips to help generate traffic to your site, and will definitely show them that it is worth taking a closer look. It is one thing to get folks to come to the site, but it's another to make them really buy in. If you can become a trusted adviser, or can convert some to your cause, then getting off the ground will be a whole lot easier.
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