Sometimes internet marketers forget there’s a whole world of often low cost promotional opportunities on their doorstep. It’s easy to become caught up in the excitement and wonder of promoting your membership website online. It’s a big world out there, with hundreds of millions of people teaming around the internet, some of whom would hopefully love to subscribe to your website and pay you money.

I reckon it’s easy to forget some of the marketing 101 truths. I was actually prompted by my post on Startup Brand Success, where I pointed out that a T Shirt seller shouldn’t forget the traditional offline avenues:

Twitter, Facebook and all the social networks offer opportunity. But don’t get blindsided by the hype. If you are selling T-Shirts then plenty of people have started out selling at their local markets, handing out samples in nightclubs, giving them to friends to wear, working to get stocked by a couple of super cool stores and so on. You need to capture the mavens, the people who lead the trends.

It reminded me that I need to keep reminding myself there’s a ready-made marketplace within cooee – our own home town, Melbourne. Not the biggest city in the world of course, but with four million people it’s not a bad starting place. It’s easy to fall prey to the glitzy world of Google AdWords and all the other online marketing systems, but all too often the tried and true methods work well, especially when launching a new business on a tight budget. I remember when we were scoping the launch of one of our membership websites in the USA. A sage and experienced friend reminded us that the USA is not a single market, it’s 52 countries all joined together. What works on East Coast won’t necessarily work on the West Coast. What people respond to in the north won’t cut the mustard in the south. Their suggestion was simply to set out to conquer California – and perhaps San Francisco to start with.

Local marketing is often over-looked by online businesses

I’ve held that advice close to heart ever since. There is no point setting out to conquer the world on Day 1 of the marketing plan. Try your own home town to start with.

Here’s 10 ways we’ve successfully promoted our membership websites in our own home town of Melbourne. And not an internet web browser to be seen.

1. Posters and flyers – the fancy schmancy internet marketers will be aghast. But the old stuff works fine. We print big bundles of handbills and pay students to distribute throughout the cafes and coffee shops.

2. Trade shows – trade shows can be an expensive exercise, so we used to try and find other companies to partner with and share the cost as a way of reaching directly to a commercial audience.

3. Lectures to university students – I’ve guest lectured at a number of universities around Australia, all with the underlying intent of promoting our membership websites. Good sign ups always eventuated, and I’m usually even paid as a sessional lecturer!

4. Community radio and TV ads – there’s loads of attention given when some multinational (or internet wanna be) spends a few million buying a 30 second spot at the Super Bowl. But airtime on community radio and television is cheap and can be very effective. It’s often listened to by non-consumers of commercial media, and with ads costing peanuts you can afford lots of repetition.

5. Run a competition for a new logo / name – when one of our membership websites needed a new logo the managers ran a competition with a decent prize – $5,000 I recall, plus several smaller prizes for 2nd, 3rd etc. Total prize pool was around $10,000. It gained loads of attention, and even a little controversy.

6. Business media love little businesses made good – the most expensive newspaper in Australia is the Financial Review – the dedicated business newspaper. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that they’d only be interested in big businesses. We’ve had several stories in the Fin. I once went to renegotiate our over draft with our business banker, and she had a clipping of a Fin article on Fiona and me on file – she was mightily impressed and approved the overdraft on the spot. Apparently being in the Fin Review was good for our credit rating.

7. Local press love a local success story – that’s why local media is called local media. And they’ll write about anyone local who seems vaguely interesting. The small paper people tend to be under-resourced, make sure you do all the leg work, with a good written press release they can copy/paste and set up a photo op.

8. Cultivate the mavens – it’s been shown you only need a few dozen mavens on your side and you can start a world wide trend. Make a super human effort to reach out to the dozen people who matter in your niche in your town.

9. Publish a directory – be philanthropic. At Arts Hub we once took over the running of the government’s directory of arts funding grants and operated the web site for a while. They were happy to have a nuisance task off their hands, and we had an excuse to reach out to every arts organization in the country. Which was handy given that this coincidentally was a key part of our marketplace.

10. Approach local organizations and associations – if you can find an offline cross-over, search out local associations and groups, and offer a membership discount to your web site they can sell on to their members. It’s a sort of affiliate scheme, you can even pay the association a commission.

What are your experiences? How have you promoted your internet business in your local marketplace?

Image: Flickr nataliemaynor

A reader contacted me the other day after reading my post ‘7 Ways to Spot an Internet Marketing Scam’ and kindly asked my advice ‘How would you start out branding a new startup company from scratch’. I took a few minutes to think back to some of our startups and came up with four key overview issues that we now live by whenever we embark on something new.

1. Don’t spread yourself too thin. We’ve tried multi-pronged marketing strategies and diluted the end result. For example, stop thinking about selling to the world. Pick a distinct geographic niche: not sure where you are located but an easy example would be, if you are in California, aim to own the state – or even just your city. Pick a demographic – 18-25 year olds. Unless you are Coca Cola with a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions you cannot hope to compete.

2. Pick one blindingly simple, easily understood, cut through idea. And plug the hell out of it. Brands per se are over done, what matters is the idea. It’s no use if everyone’s heard your brand name, but doesn’t have a clue what it does, or fails to engage.

3. Don’t be suckered by the ‘expert’ consultants, agencies etc. We once burnt through $50,000 of Google Ads in 3 months courtesy of a bunch of ‘experts’ at a digital media agency. Almost zero effect. We were blinded by vast spreadsheets of ad groups, statistics and analysis. Barely sold a thing. Go with your heart, take all advice (including mine!) with a grain of salt mixed with your own gut reactions. It’s your brand, your product, and you must have faith in it and yourself.

4. Twitter, Facebook and all the social networks offer opportunity. But don’t get blindsided by the hype. If you are selling T-Shirts then plenty of people have started out selling at their local markets, handing out samples in nightclubs, giving them to friends to wear, working to get stocked by a couple of super cool stores and so on. You need to capture the mavens, the people who lead the trends.

There’s something of a debate raging in my household about the best way to start a membership web site. Do you have a subscription fee from day 1, or build a free list first to bulk up the numbers for a couple of months, then move to paid?

And no, the debate is not about the Niche Content Millionaire blog, it’s a little idea we’ve had tucked away in the closet for a while, but which we’re considering launching later this year.

Here are the options we’re toying with:

Start Paid

You charge from day one. If people want to access your content they must sign up and pay their membership.

Pros

• Cash flow starts immediately
• You set the tone for the site straightaway, people understand this is a paid subscription

Cons

• You need enough content in the site to justify pitching a paid membership
• You are probably not capturing a large amount of traffic

Start Paid Trial

Users hand over their credit card number, but you don’t bill for the first 30 days.

Pros

• Up front commitment secured
• You can pitch as a 30 day trial, no payment if they cancel in the 30 days

Cons

• You can lose a bunch of people because they decide to cancel
• Once people cancel, it’s much harder to go back to them later and pitch an offer

Start Free

You deliberately make everything free for a period of time – say three months – while you build up the site, its content and membership. You are up front with people and transparent about the plan, so they are aware a membership fee is coming later down the track.

Pros

• With no financial commitment means people will sign up readily
• You can build your list quickly to gain traffic and repeat visits

Cons

• You need a really great conversion campaign when time comes to charge
• Your list can wind up cluttered with a bunch of hangers on who you’ll never extract $$ from

When we started Arts Hub back in 2000, we commenced with a free membership. Not, I hasten to say, because we had every plan to charge, rather it was a free service we thought might be useful to a few people. What changed our minds were the thousands who signed up in the first few months. That gave us the impetus to put together the paid membership, which launched in November 2000. Within three months we’d sold $50,000 worth of memberships, and the rest, as they say, is history (we tell this whole story in detail in Niche Content Millionaire).

So the Start Free model worked for us – really well.

We have experiemented with 30 day credit card trials – most notably on our USA and UK sites, although with mixed results. I became a fan of these trials after researching their success on other membership sites. But I’m not sure we really nailed the whole process. We had to turn off straight membership sales while the 30 day trial offer was in place. We aqcuired thousands of new users, but a great many cancelled out. We did some number crunching and found that we would have made more money simply selling membershipas straight up, and spared ourselves the hassle of all the work to ensure the trials did convert to recurrent paid members.

We’re leaning towards the Start Free option for our new membership site. We know we’ve had good experience at running conversion campaigns over many years designed to turn free listers into paid members. A well designed competition and incentive program almost always does the trick.

My favourite blog post for the day is on Dosh Dosh “An Essential Marketing Principle: Give Before You Try to Get”. Maki’s post is all about how, as a marketer, you need to give to your audience before expecting something in return.

It’s a big, bad confusing world out there online. Scammers, many masquerading as ‘internet marketers’ abound, propagating get rich quick schemes that use high pressure, guilt driven sales tactics to extract a quick sale from you – with little or no ongoing value or return.

“They don’t want to be lied to. That’s why they are hesitant to believe what you say or claim. They don’t want their feelings to be exploited. That’s why they are wary about trusting you with their true thoughts. They have been fooled before and no one wants to feel stupid again.”

Maki hits the nail on the head when she says you need to ‘be known as a giver’. Maki’s right, people are cautious. Any customer with half a brain will do their online research before handing over their hard earnt cash. They’ll Google you, talk to their friends (never ever underestimate peer referral and pressure), they’ll want to make an informed, sensible decision.

Many years ago I used to teach a Relationship Marketing workshop, the kernel of which was about establishing a dialogue with your customers, a feedback loop of ideas and support that encouraged businesses to forge an ongoing, value driven relationship with its customers. My workshop was targeted at arts organisations, because that was my specialist field, but the princples were and remain universal.

At our subscription business Arts Hub we used to try and find ways to surprise our customers, to surpass their expectations. And so often it was the cheap and easy tactics that bore the most fruit.

Two that come to mind are chocolate frogs and loyalty recognition

Chocolate Frog Surprise

I was reminded about chocolate frogs by Fiona’s post the other day about the coffee mug she received from a subscription website she’s been a member of for years. We used coffee mugs to great effect at Arts Hub as incentives for people to renew their subscriptions. So they knew a mug was on the way, but when they opened the box we always ensured there was a little surprise – a chocolate Freddo Frog tucked into the mug. Cost us virtually nothing but amazing feedback. Interestingly Fiona and I were at the @tweetupmellers getogether of Twitter people here in Melbourne and met Phil Leahy who says he used to do exactly the same thing when he was running his extremely successful eBay seller business – he used to add a frog into each parcel they sent out.

Loyalty Recognition

It’s a human trait that we all like to be liked and recognised, the most powerful attribute of an individual is being recognised as an individual. Which is one reason why personalised online services can work so well – they cater to the individual not the mass. At Arts Hub every few months we’d dig into the database and find a bunch of members who’d renewed recently and who had been members continuously for several years. Bear in mind Arts Hub started in 2000, and there are still people subscribed today who joined nearly 10 years ago. We’d pull a list of people who had 3, 4 or 5 years or more under their belt and send them a ‘thank you’ email, and tell them we’d add a bonus few months of membership onto their subscription.

Both of these tactics cost little, took only a few minutes to implement, yet between them yielded some of the most positive, recurrent feedback out of all our marketing efforts.