The target for this week was to get 250 unique visitors. Today, on Sunday, this week has brought only 35 visitors to this blog. Compared to the not-so-great 90 visitors last week, the result is rather pathetic.

But this is actually expected, as I really couldn't find that much time to post in this blog during this week, nor did I update the Twitter account related to this blog.

So it's time to put together a marketing strategy to bring visitors to this blog.

At this point, I'm putting together a zero-cost marketing strategy, which means that I won't be using any paid forms of advertising. Of course we have to remember that there's no such thing as free lunch, as I will be required to spend time executing the marketing strategy, so in this case the zero-cost refers only to not using paid mediums for advertising.

The Zero-Cost Marketing Strategy

1. Utilize Twitter and Facebook
   
   Twitter can provide an easy platform for pushing out advertising for the blog, although starting with Twitter can be time-consuming as you need a group of followers to market to. One of the main points with Twitter to take into account is the quantity-to-quality -ratio. Twitter has a lot of users with 10,000+ followers, which are mostly useless for marketing purposes as they usually also follow at least as many. To do effective marketing on Twitter, you need quality visitors which will actually read your tweets and re-tweet them.
   
   Facebook is the other platform which is often is referred to as one of the new marketing platforms which require no money spent on the medium. Of course Facebook also provides paid marketing, but in this case we aren't focusing on this. The problem with Facebook is that you need an existing customer base to communicate with as Facebook doesn't help users in finding new content in a similar way as Twitter. Therefore a Facebook page will not be useful to being with and Facebook needs to be approached in a diffent manner.
   
   One of the main advantages of Facebook are applications. By providing a small application (such as a poll), that would promote the site. This does require require development, though.
    
2. Sign-up for a banner exchange
   
   Yes, banner exchange programs can be a possible marketing method, even if it's not 2001 anymore. As this site will hopefully have paid advertising on it sometime in the future, I can now use those slots to display ads from a banner exchange. In exchange, my advertising will be shown on other sites.
   
   When selecting a banner exchange program, you need to be careful to select one with a decent reputation. In some cases, banner exchange -programs can be shady and may actually use the ads to distribute AdWare. I've opted for 1800banners.com, and one of the selection criteria was the repuation of the site provided by MyWOT.
    
3. Comment actively on blogs that have a large readership
   
   A way to get your blog noticed by fellow bloggers is to comment on other blogs. To get results from this, this needs to be done actively, preferrably around five times a day. Of course, to avoid being labeled a spammer, these comments should be on different blogs, at least different entries. Hence, targeting blogs with a high volume of posts and visitors is safer. The challenge with high-volume blogs is that you do need to provide something insightful though, otherwise your comment will be ignored as it won't be the only one.
    
4. Add the site in every single directory you find
   
   Directories can provide valuable links to the site, even if they won't provide that much traffic. Googling, for example, blog directory yields numerous results. Especially the blogs that provide a list of newest additions will be valuable, as they will most likely provide at least some traffic.

From now on, I will attempt to market this blog following this strategy. But to continue on the path I started with the last few posts, you can vote on how this will work. Participate!

Disclaimer: If you're an actual marketing professional, reading this post may cause brain damage. Really. It also may make you want to scream "No! You don't do it like that! Step away from the keyboard, now!".

I had a revelation today. Well, not really a relevation, not even a mini-enlightenment. Just kind of a realization.

It came to me when I was on all fours, and covered in sweat.

I was scrubbing my bathroom floor tiles, and I had a realization about Twitter.

But before we move on to my realization, let's step back a little and go back to the first post of this blog. In the post, I linked to my new Twitter account, @blogproduct, which I'm using to communicate about this blog. One of the main ideas behind this blog was to not spend that much money on marketing, but rather leverage social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

For some reason, I expected Twitter to be one of the shortcuts to happiness when it comes marketing this blog. It took me only 48 hours to realize it wasn't. During the last 48 hours, Twitter has brought in 11 visitors to this blog. My account has 74 followers right now, so this means only around 15% of the followers have followed a link either from the profile or from my tweets. To kickstart my Twitter marketing, I've encouraged people to follow the account with my normal account, I posted a intentionally eye-catching tweet pointing to my second post, and all but begged to get RT'd. All of the attempts failed pretty miserably.

So the realization?

Twitter, and using it for marketing, is a lot like cleaning my bathroom tiles: it's hard work, not all that fun, and I need to get my hands dirty if I want to get anything done.

Currently, most of my followers seem to have the same agenda as me: drive traffic somewhere. A lot of them have 10k+ followers. So if I post something using my account, what are the odds that it'll be noticed? Pretty much non-existant. I began going for quantity of followers, thinking that if I get hundreds of followers, that'll be enough to have enough people read and retweet me.

So I need to get quality followers, and a lot of them. Users that are actually interested in seeing what I post. This brings us to a rather large issue: I need to start coming up with interesting content.

That might be a problem...

Oh, and to finish off:

1. Follow me on Twitter!
2. Re-tweet this post by clicking on the "Retweet" -button on the right-hand side of this post.