THE POST ON APRIL 1ST WAS AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE. Please stop emailing me to tell me that I’m an idiot, I know that already.

Marketing is key.

Really.

Without marketing, your product is worthless. Your product could be a blog, an eBook, a promotional video of you dancing to the soundtrack of “That 70s Show”… it could be the best product around, but if no one sees it it is worthless. In the case of the video, you might be pretty happy should no one see it, however for your blog, your products, your websites… you need to market the crap out of them to stand a chance of succeeding.

The problem out there today with many new bloggers is that they listen to the blogging basics – everyone says, work on your content. You can keep working on your content today, tomorrow, and the rest of your life, but it is worth jack all if no one sees it.

The biggest LIE that is told to new bloggers is that they should build up a month or so’s worth of content before they start marketing.

I used to believe this too, but it is a lie. You should start marketing your website/blog as soon as your first post is released.

In the case of virtual products, you should start marketing before you’ve even written a word or created the software. Marketing builds hype, and this hype can be turned into valuable customers.

I’ll give you a real life example. A couple of months ago, I had a pretty sweet idea… I tested it, and it worked (made near a thousand). I decided to share the knowledge, but keep it limited to twenty people so that it wouldn’t get saturated – I never even had a website for this. All I did was post as my MSN message that I had a new guide out and it was pretty sweet – within the first day, I had over fifty requests, even though I hadn’t written a word. I did however mention the basics, as well as my success (with screenshot proof), and tell them I’d IM them later

After I finished writing, I messaged the first twenty people to ask – copies sold out within 12 hours. By doing marketing before hand, I had saved myself quite a bit of time, as well as earned more money.

You should start marketing from the word go.

Not after your introduction post, perhaps, but after your very first “useful” post, go wild. Heck, why not have a contest to commemorate the opening of your blog? Contests are a great way to build buzz and get in subscribers, and best of all they take very little time and energy to organize (I will post about how I organized my contest soon.

Marketing I will be doing over the next few months

A few of you were rocked by my revelation that I was not entering into a lifetime deal with Fruitful Time, but anyways, now time for serious things.

First off, the forum.

I posted about it here yesterday, and messenged those on instant messenger – so far I have near 30 members. Fairly decent for its first day, but I want more. Due to that, I’ve thrown down the gauntlet and challenged posters there – I will be having a contest (with cash prizes probably to promote the forum), but anyways; that contest only goes ahead if the forum has 1,000+ posts by April 9th, 11:59 PM. You can read the thread here. Make sure you join if you haven’t, and if you’d like to sponsor something (I have faith that people will reach the post target, since 1/5th of it is almost reached and that’s just the first day) message me.

This is going to be the biggest blogging forum around, and you will be missing out if you do not join.

The blog.

That is, my blog. I’ve always said that I have big plans for this website, but it seems that I’ve not convinced my readers of that yet, as the RSS subscriber count tends to stay fairly static. Anyways, I will be working on getting people to subscribe and visit, as outside (the extremely strong) community I have here this blog is not very well known.

Although contests are great, I will be running an experiment for the month of April – to see how much the RSS count grows without bribes. Fluff it up as you want, a contest is essentially bribing people to subscribe to your feed. I will be using some of the basics of blogging, ones that all newbies were taught – ones that anyone, even those without a dime to spend can follow through with. You know, guest posting, link bait and all that. If you have a blog with 350+ subscribers and wouldn’t mind a guest post, contact me.

I will also be doing some offline marketing – visitors from Dubai are by far the best visitors to my blog, with around 15:00 minutes spent on average and a less than 30% bounce rate, and the world of online business is just untapped here – I was thinking of setting up a basic course and charging $150 an hour to teach people how to use Wordpress about internet marketing and online business in general, but apparently I’m too young for that here. Ah well, eh?

I am also thinking about getting a custom theme for this blog – we will see. Unique Blog Designs are a bit too expensive for me at the moment (and to be utterly honest, I don’t really like their designs) but if I can find someone that can create a coded Wordpress theme for a couple hundred or little more, I will look into it. I’m also looking at getting a custom vBulletin design created, sad thing is that none of my designers that I ever use have done them, and I’m slightly bored of the current base blue version. I will keep people updated, and will certainly let you guys know when tshirts are out.

Plugs

Wordpress Link Cloak

Just two plugs today, ones that you guys may or may not find useful – anyways, the first one if from David Turnbull, who’s launched Wordpress Link Cloak – it is basically the useful version of WP Affiliate Pro. What Wordpress Link Cloak does is create usable affiliate links from inside your Wordpress dashboard, meaning that you won’t have to touch the code if you don’t want to – you can also vary your options, and create different types of affiliate links, for example:

/newstheme.php

/newstheme

/go/newstheme

/go/newstheme.php

All from within your dashboard. Although you could manually do it, this is faster and combines features from a couple other plugins (Link A Dink being one) to provide you with a proper link cloaking plugin for Wordpress.

Great things sadly don’t come free in life, so Wordpress Link Cloak will set you back $77 – if you’re lazy, it will be a good addition, if you have the time however, you can do what is does for free.

Adii’s Wordpress Contest

I told myself I’d enter this, anyways here it is – Adii is a cool Wordpress designer (I’m using his Gazette theme for Blog Premiere) and he’s running a contest for a Developer’s License, obviously something I’d love to win as it would save me a chunk of cash (I was going to buy it anyways but don’t have the money to spend at the moment). This includes all themes he’s released, including the Original News Theme, the Live Wire series and a few others.

Contest ends tomorrow, all you have to do is post about it – one hopes that this blog wins. We’ll see how it goes, eh? I’d personally love the Live Wire series most out of the package, as I wanted to buy it but needed the funds to invest in my projects so didn’t – getting a Developer’s license would allow me to play with it all I wanted without the dent in my Paypal balance (it’s worth $500.00).

Anyways, have a tonne of work to do, feel free to let me know if you have any ideas at all, no matter how silly you think they are