Article Marketing
You would think that a legitimate company wouldn’t need to pay for exposure in the magazine. However, we had an existing relationship with the publisher (the thing with “ direct marketing” sounds really complicated). I sent him an email suggesting that he contact us for a short article on the topic of our services. He said it sounded “great” and so I wrote a compelling enough piece for him.
You would think that a legitimate company wouldn’t be too afraid to write a short post about themselves on a relevant, credible website. You would be wrong. I felt really nervous about posting on our website. There are so many articles out there; could we compete with all of them? How many readers would check the site after reading our piece? Could we convince people to check the site? These were all legitimate questions that I had. We did a test run and posted the article to my blog for 3 hours and it had 30 hits. That was it. I didn’t like the feel of it. We published the article and scheduled it to run in the magazine. I did some more research about the audience. And that’s when I saw that over 100,000 people receive their weekly magazine subscription at their door. We were running against an established brand, but I was really excited about the prospects.
I wanted to run it on our own website so I could earn money from affiliate posts on our site; the response was phenomenal. The site got an additional 120 visits, and we received a very nice amount of email feedback, so we decided to post on another blog.
Of course, this whole process took about a week and a half, so I had plenty of time to get butterflies in my stomach every time I hit “publish” on the website. And with each piece we posted, we gained more exposure and more money. It felt like all the pieces were falling into place.
It helped that we came across someone who was writing about us on the Huffington Post (The coolest website ever!). People really liked it and it got a ton of traffic. It was a rush to have people recognize who you are and actually read what you wrote. People like an underdog, and the reality is that we are an underdog. We work hard to earn our clients’ trust. We don’t work hard to take their money. We like to educate clients and make them feel like they are the most important part of our company.
Paid Social Media Campaigns
As you can see, it was really important to me to position myself as the ideal client to work with. I knew that I could not afford to alienate the real clients, so I started posting about my advertising campaign on as many of the sites as I could. If it gets clicks, people like a bigger reach, and they're an awesome company (like Leadpages or HubSpot or Codecademy), then that makes it all worthwhile. I sent several emails out on social media (Twitter
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