My Internet Marketing Confession...

• By: Daiv Russell
• On: 01/09/2009 06:22:55
• In: Internet Marketing
• Comments: 3

I admit it.  I'm a notorously late adopter in technology circles.  Windows came out, and I, being a keyboard fanatic (hey, if you typed 80 wpm, you would be, too) took years to switch over to Windows.  I wasn't using Windows until version 3.11 in 1990 or so.  Now I help people maximize their productivity with macros for Word, Excel and Access.

Everyone and their dog was on LinkedIn, but I did nothing with it until a few months ago.  Sure, I signed up and created an account a few years ago, but I just let the account rot for a while - never really using it.  Now I'm one of the few people who have over 500 personal contacts in LinkedIn.  And these are people I've really worked with and met.  Since then, I've optimized my profile and get job offers from it, regularly.

All of this leads to...

My startling confession

Are you ready for this?  I posted my very first YouTube video - yesterday.  How long has YouTube been up?  Years!  How many people watch YouTube videos?  MILLIONS a day! 

As a technology guy who understands marketing, people are always asking about the new hotness, but quite frankly my technology adoption process is to wait for something to really take off, make sure it's not going to disappear on me, and then REALLY SINK MY TEETH IN!

YouTube is certainly there.  You can check out my YouTube video by clicking this picture (while you're there, rate it a 5 and leave a comment about how awesome the video is):

Okay, now that you've watched the video (and left a nice comment, right?)...      I'll walk you through how the marketing plan works...

Behind the Scenes with an Internet Marketing NinjaNerd

I've done a bit of market research and determined that Twitter is bringing in people by the droves, but they are having a difficult time understanding parts of it.  Lots of users have many questions about basic functionality - and thus came up with the idea for my new product - A series of videos dubbed "a Video Learning System" (that sounds much cooler than "set of videos" doesn't it?) which will guide people through the various features of Twitter and help them to be good users of the tool and make friends, influence people, make sales, connect, etc. - all sorts of neat things that Twitter lets people accomplish.  If you ask someone what they accomplished at a cocktail party, you'll hear - made friends, found a new business contact, networked, got seen by some of the important players - The same thing goes in Twitterville.  You'll get as many different answers as you ask the same about "How do you use Twitter?"

First, I have allocated the domain names Using-Twitter.com and How-to-Twitter.info for promoting it.  These domain names were chosen based upon keyword research.  They should naturally rank well for these keywords.

I've been posting blog posts on How-To-Twitter.info demonstrating various ways people use twitter.  The next step is to create backlinks to those blog posts - my favorite method for this is article marketing.  I come up with a few topics related to the blog post, write up some articles, and then publish them to free-reprint article directories.  Newsletter authors and bloggers then grab this free content for the publication in exchange for links to my desired site(s) with the right keyword links.  Even if they just use the domain name, I get highly relevant keyword links.

Simultaneously, I've been building up quite a fan following on Twitter - growing at about 125 new followers a day or so, now that I'm maximizing the technology.  I've been helping people use Twitter for marketing themselves, their business, and just get them up to speed and make a name for myself.  I'm not ruling the world on there or anything, but I'm doing fairly well.

I've been building up excitement for the new product and lining up testimonials as I move forward.  The process of getting people psyched up before the product is available is called "salting".  Movie studios do this for blockbusters to be - so their "make it or break it" opening weekend numbers are as high as possible.

I've gone WAY out of my way to make the initial video as interesting and potentially viral as possible given how new I am to the technology.  So, when people read the article, they're likely to view the web site and/or the video.  If I've done a good enough job at making the marketing, itself, entertaining - people will tell their friends, etc. and they'll tell two friends, and so on. If you like it, and you're into Twitter - I expect you to share it - for the knowledge, for the novelty, and well, for me...

I'll keep you posted on my progress.   

P.S.  If you want me to set up a similar internet marketing campaign for your business - send me an email and we'll work through what's good for your client-base and target market.  This is exactly the kind of thing I do for my clients all the time - I'm just doing it for myself this time.  Now I can show you more of what goes on behind the scenes without breaching the confidence of my very successful clients who want to keep me to themselves.  (You know who you are)