Follow Our Launch

Traffic through Pay Per Click Ad Campaigns

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Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising uses search engines, online advertising networks and content sharing websites. Through PPC advertisers only have to pay when a visitor actually clicks on one of their ads in order to visit their website. Keyword phrases play a vital role in all this.

We take our keyword list and build out two campaigns in Google pay per click:

1. We place our ads on the Google search pages and pay per click.

2. We source web pages in our industry that have Pay Per Click ads on the pages and we set our ad campaigns to be placed within these specific pages and pay per 1000 impressions. We aim to pay $2 to $3 per 1000 page impressions so at a conversion of 0.1% click through per impression we are paying 20 cents per click. The better the click through rate the less we pay per click knowing how much we are setting as our budget.

We have already got our landing pages optimized per keyword phrase so we place one ad campaign in Google per keyword and we link that ad campaign to the page on our site with the same keyword in the title and in the headings; we also make sure that the text is dense with the keyword.

By directly matching the ad campaign to an optimized page with the exact same keyword phrases in both, we tell Google about our ad and also where we are sending people to if they click it and find a perfect match.

We at Events Listed use the Peal and Flick advertising method in Google. We write two ads per keyword phrase and we run them both. The ad that secures the best click through rate every 4 days to a week stays. The second best ad is changed for a new ad to challenge the current best ad.

The best of the two ads always stays while the second challenges and keeps pushing your click through rate up with better advertising by holding your focus on the ad quality and click through rates.

Google gives instant discounts to advertisers who know what they are doing. As a sign of their good business sense, they reward good advertising with cheaper rates and in doing so they make a packet for themselves. On the other hand, you have the bad advertisers who send people to some page that has no direct relevance to the actual keyword.

The difference is that the good advertiser will get a higher click through rate with better ads so for example if getting a 5% click through rate at 50 cents, Google will make a lot more money than the bad advertiser getting a poor click through rate of .05% paying a dollar per click.

The good advertiser also makes money by sending Google customers to solutions on the first click; this means he stays in the business for a longer period and also broadens his market. It ends up being a win, win, win, win situation as Google customers are happy, Google makes more money, good advertisers pay less and bad advertisers stop advertising.

Traffic through Video Marketing Campaigns

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So we all know that Google is huge. But if it is King Kong of the online world then think Godzilla – something that’s twice as big and effective, we are talking about YouTube. It is all about videos, an element that can also make your site more visible, increase its ranking and generate at least 20% more traffic to it.

However, like every other tool to be effective, you have to follow some best practices in order to make your video marketing a success. Your video should have a good title and description with your URL in it; tags are equally important as they determine the search results. Presentation is the key and good quality video can do wonders for you. Make sure it’s a reasonable sized video so it doesn’t lead to poor streaming. Remember to submit your video to multiple sites as this can lead to 3-7 times more traffic.

An amazing fact is that only half of the videos are watched through video sharing sites. The other half is watched on other people’s sites or blogs where these have been embedded. So if your content is good, other people end up doing free advertising and promotion for you.

At Events Listed, we have made our event launch guidelines podcast videos. We have about 17 weeks worth of videos at 6 videos per week. We post this content onto the video platforms across platforms. We syndicate the video feeds into other social networking platforms and we podcast the sound track into itunes so our videos are on as many pages across the net as possible.

Our application intros are also in the form of video tours that lead the viewers through our sales funnels. The videos are designed to cover different elements of the business and are introduced one by one in our email campaigns. These videos therefore become an integral part of our hype generation strategies.

We recommend that you load your videos across hundreds of platforms; embed them at your main website, FaceBook and MySpace pages, blog entries and content sharing sites.

For massive distribution we recommend that you use Tube Mogul and Traffic Geyser. The tracking services of Tube Mogul are incredible. You can track the traffic rate not only your but also your competitors’ site. This can help you find the reasons behind a peak or a slump. You can also watch viewer ship, comments and ratings through Tube Mogul.

Another great tool that we recommend is Traffic Geyser. It has been especially designed to get its user a high ranking on search engines. Soon after you upload you video, it is directed to multiple video sharing sites. You can also bookmark your video content, create podcasts and submit them to directories. It has a staggering result rate as it can get you great Google ranking in a matter of minutes.

These tools lead to wider distribution, social strengthening and time saving. However, do keep in mind that your videos should be gripping and interactive. A word of warning here: bad quality videos can decrease traffic so put up only the good stuff. As everyone is using videos these days, so make sure yours are creative and imaginative. As Robert frost so aptly put it: “What is required is sight and insight – then you might add one more: excite.”

Traffic Through Social Bookmarking

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Social bookmarking allows you to save, organize, search and share web pages. The sharing can be both private and public or a combo of both. The people allowed to view your bookmarks can do so by tags, categories, chronological order or through search engines. Web feeds are now provided by many bookmarking services to keep you and all those who share updated. Visitors can also rate and comment on these bookmarks.

However, best practices are paramount in order to generate traffic using bookmarking. If not done properly, you won’t have any followers and what’s worse is that you might never know it. Some of the best practices that we at Events Listed use are:

This is just basic general stuff. To generate traffic, we bookmark every link that we twitter as we twitter while we bookmark every blog post we publish in the same 10 to 1 ratio as with twitter.

We do this daily across all our bookmarking accounts which attracts followers in our niche as it works in the micro-blogs.

Social bookmarking is now a popular way of communicating and is fast becoming an invaluable marketing tool for increased traffic and promotion of products and services. The true extent of its effectiveness and how info can and is shared by people can be judged by the fact that Digg.com, the most popular social bookmarking has more than 8 million visitors per month. And the best part is that you don’t need your personal computer to access your bookmarks, but can do so from any computer anywhere in the world.

To make sure that our bookmarking works, we do it with extra care as mistagging, spelling mistakes in tagging, multiple meaning tags are some of the snags of this system.

Traffic Through Micro Blogging & link Baiting

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Micro-blogging services allow you to write short messages to your friends and anyone you want. These can also be synced up with instant messengers and cellphones. The reason behind their increasing popularity is that they let you share personal updates even if you don’t have the time to update your site or blog. This way you can stay connected with those in your social network.

We have accounts at 12 micro-blogging sites. We set up a http://www.tweetscan.com account where you can add keywords and have them email us all the tweets within twitter that contain our pre-set key words. This gets us a direct feed of emails from active twitterers and helps us narrow down a target audience.

We actively network with these prospective customers by responding to their posts. Over 60% will follow us back which is how we build our twitter network and as this list grows it filters down through the lesser known micro-blogging accounts we also have accounts with.

We believe that conversation is the key to building trust and relationships so we allocate a certain amount of time each week to network with the members in each of these sites.

We then set up hellotxt.com to feed all 12 networks through one syndicated feed via sending an email through our gmail account. We subscribe to our own blogs and using an RSS plugin of aweber.com (our auto-responder email system) we set up a campaign just for us to evaluate - to have the headings and first 140 characters of each of our own new blog posts sent to us via a dedicated email account each day.

We also use Google news to send us posts from blogs across the net that provide tips and tricks regarding event planning. We can set Google news to send us the heading, a snippet of the content as well as the links to the full posts of blogs that offer latest news for your target audiences.

This brings us to another great and highly effective way of generating traffic – link-baiting. It is a form of link building that attracts people to place links regarding specific content from other sites onto your website.

With our content being emailed to a dedicated micro-blogging email every day by Google news and our own blog posts being emailed to the same account each day, all we need to do is forward these emails onto our hellotxt.com accounts. We edit them so they become eye-catching and click-tempting link bait for our audience. We link off using a tiny URL to hide the destination of each link forcing the visitors to click in order to follow the story.

We work on a ratio of 10 industry event news, tips and tricks related posts or non-events listed content link bait to every 1 link bait that we throw in dropping people onto our own blog posts for that day.

This attracts a massive number to us as each post is seen by all of our followers and by all those people who follow them. We know the recipe of successful link-baiting is quality content and it guarantees that people will come back for more – once they are hooked on our bait, we don’t let them go.

If all our link baits are event planning and promoting specific then we are attracting a following of targeted people across all 12 networks and 1 in every 10 links they follow is direct exposure to our blog content by a person they have already decided to follow in micro blogging.

Our stats show that a very large percentage start following our blog posts daily through being introduced this way which is a direct route into our sales funnel.

Traffic through Social Media Campaigns

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Social media is an-inclusive term for all sorts of web activities that combine technology with social communication. It includes emailing, posting, blogging, instant messaging, picture and video sharing to name a few. Some of the most popular social media applications are Wikipedia (for references), FaceBook (for social networking), YouTube (for video sharing and social networking), Flickr (for photo sharing), Twitter (for social networking and micro-blogging), del.icio.us (for social bookmarking), and Digg (for social news).

Using all this technology and myriad of applications you can generate and increase traffic to your site. We have ensured that our social media campaign is a hit by utilizing FaceBook and MySpace strategies. In order to do so, we have created our profile, pages, groups and social ads.

Our profile is more specific and more contained than our various pages that cater to different aspects of interest for event planners and promoters. We keep our pages updated by regularly adding information to them. We also embed videos, make announcements, and provide links to other related sites, etc. We have joined groups and run social ads to drive traffic to our pages and main website. We do all this not only to keep you well-informed but also to keep you interested so that you come back for more.

The key point to remember in any social media campaign is the social attitude. It is a powerful tool that can mold people’s perceptions and change “visitors into buyers.” We are using this tool the best way by tuning into people’s mindset and viewing the whole setup as a community in which there are norms and rules. We stick with the following points to make ourselves a success:

1. Avoiding active selling and pitching because we know that first we have to build our repute and prove our worth.

2. Actively participating as this is an investment and our involvement with others and on their sites will lead people to us and improve our SEO ranking.

3. Adding value by offering the best of our site as we must start by thinking of others rather than ourselves.

4. Being transparent and honest in our social networking activities.

We have built an original, healthy and focused network for our business. By using FaceBook as our base platform, we have expanded our network by joining groups and linking them to FaceBook pages. Add to this FaceBook news feeds and we have a winner on our hands. We also rely on micro-blogging and link baiting to generate and increase traffic to our site because we believe that the techniques are endless and the results boundless.

Traffic through Article Marketing Campaigns

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Nowadays, successful online businesses are using “article marketing” as a way of generating traffic and building sales. It requires you to write original, concise and informative articles and submit them to specific websites or general article directories. People looking for the same content then republish your article on their content-sharing sites. Once this circulation begins, it gets people clicking their way to your websites.

The purpose of article marketing is to rank high in searches, dominate niches, generate revenue and of course, drive loads of traffic. For this purpose, we have created accounts at sites like HubPages, Squidoo, ever.com, gather.com etc. that allow members to create separate, individual pages on any topic.

Article marketing is a thread weaved into our overall marketing strategies. The main point that you need to keep in mind while article writing on such pages is targeting the right keywords. This is one practice that needs time and resources and it is recommended that you spend both on it because the results it can bring are astonishing. In order to get a double win, we have gone for the most-searched areas to get ourselves on top of search engine rankings. After listing all the keywords, we have made titles out of them.

We have designed our internal linking plan in a well-rounded way (pun intended) so that we don’t have any orphan pages as this can seriously undermine one’s repute. Our well-connected layout of main hub page, main and sub pods also ensures constant and fresh link juice for us from other content sharing sites. We embed 2 links into each of our articles that link pages two and three levels deeper than the index on our site. We ensure the link text has the same words in the page title on our site that we are linking to.

Article marketing is a dynamic way of making your business a success. It is most powerful when you combine knowledge of the keywords used to search for your site, the pages that are most important in your site, and content that highlights your prospects.

Traffic through SEO

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“It is not the job of Search Engine Optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the web site so that it becomes an eagle.”
– Bruce Clay, CEO Bruce Clay, Inc.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) concept was created in 1997. Most search engines nowadays scan, index and classify web pages automatically with sophisticated algorithms. Keywords are the basis of the SEO page, therefore, it is extremely vital to develop a list of keywords that potential readers might use. We can strategically build out pages that target one major key word phrase that we are chasing; a case in point being Events Listed with it’s over 700 phrases. Each page is SEO optimized for one phrase that includes page titles, headings 1 & 2 and the text on each page is unique and contains our phrase multiple times in bold text.

It is most important that our site is designed properly for SEO in order for it to have any effect. If we do not plan the site properly from the get go it doesn’t matter how many links we get because we won’t rank. We can generate and direct traffic to our website by following the following SEO strategies:

• Offer keyword enriched text: The notoriety and sequence of keywords on the internet are crucial for the way search engines rank and index web pages. Another vital factor is density of these keywords; it should range between 5-10%. The title of the page, being its most important feature, should include one or more keywords. This key word density should naturally occur within an pages copy written for visitors not search engine spiders. We recommend using web copy writing specialists who know how to write with this focus.
• Site design and information layout: Though content itself is of primary importance, how it is presented is equally vital. We strategically build pages that target one major key word phrase that we are chasing. Each page is SEO optimized for one phrase that includes page titles, headings - the text on each page is unique content.
• Provide hyperlinks and link development: The next imperative feature that determines the ranking of the page is the use of hyperlinks within a web page. The links must correspond with the content and keywords must be chosen carefully to describe this connection. Extra care is recommended or else we can end up with penalties. As Lauren Hall Cracknell, Director of Search Engine Marketing at Schipul, says “Practice safe SEO and you will always come out on top.” The quantity and quality of links determines link popularity.
• Spreading the content far and wide: We post 10 unique articles pertinent to key words we are chasing per week in 3rd party content & article posting sites then we use copyscape.com to find other sites who have posted our articles, we send emails to these webmasters who are usually adsense publishers always looking for content. We agree to send them weekly articles for their sites, all with links embedded in them. We also use a product called SEO elite which sources all websites that link to any other website, we search for backlinks to competitor sites and download these sites “who is” information, we set up dedicated Gmail accounts for sending emails to these web masters daily offering them FREE unique content articles written specifically for their site weekly with links in them back to ours.
• Suitable for an International Market: To be a hit on the international scene requires professional translation of web pages, registering a domain name in the target market among other features.
• Ready to go writers: We have a stable of writers who write for us on contract that we pay $20 an article.

Though definitely a golden egg, SEO should be one of our marketing tools if we don’t want to suffer heavy losses. Without becoming dependent on it, we must make sure that this golden egg hatches. In order to do so, we must avoid duplication; according to Dan Thies, President of SEO Research Labs, it is the biggest problem in SEO. All broken links should be immediately fixed; we should also offer redirects and user navigation.

Over time the more quality, targeted, recent & relevant links we accumulate into our domain combined with the efficiency of our sites internal linking structure at dispersing incoming link juice the more targeted search engine traffic we start to get over time. If the pages people land on in our site match the link text they click to get to it then we have built a transport system that will steadily and consistently lead visitors into our sales funnel and eventually publishing an event page to sell tickets on our application.

It’s important to be patient with SEO and always remember, the first day on the internet will always be the worst performing day for any web page.

Eventslisted.com - Traffic generating strategy

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Getting into the finer details of how we are planning to generate traffic into our sites. As you all know, getting the right kind of traffic that can actually contribute to the bottom-lines is somewhat tricky to direct. The importance of traffic needn’t be stressed - suffice it to say that without traffic even the best and most innovative applications can wither away. Great applications have the natural potential to create a stir through WOM amongst the targeted users. However, you need to have your basic traffic generating strategies covered, to be able to create the initial buzz. Our strategy is multi-fold:

1- Traffic through SEO

You’re probably sick of hearing about this, but Search Engine Optimization is the one of the most effective ways to get noticed. There are people out there who will find our service incredibly useful for their businesses or life, they just don’t know about it yet. How do you get to them? Right when they are looking to solve a problem in their business on Google or yahoo search. The match-making doesn’t happen magically – your pages need to be visibly present on the search results for them to see you. Search engine marketing is the Holy Grail of long term traffic generation but it should never be your only strategy.

Our plan here is straightforward. We have come up with 800 specifically targeted keyword phrases. Based on the keywords we have researched our target audience may be entering into the search engines when looking for solutions to event planning related matters. We have designed our website in a way that partitions different sections of our site through internal linking strategies and added a robot text file that tell search engine spiders where they can and can-not travel within the domain. This way we have control over the partitioned sections of the site ensuring only the sections we want indexed and optimized by the search engines are.

We then focus on optimizing one section of pages at a time & slowly link these sections as we rank them over a 12 month period that will result in us having 800+ pages specifically designed & optimized to show up in the top page of search results for tens of thousands of targeted visitors within the search engines every week. Each of our pages represents a solution to problems that are represented by one key word phrase per page which enables us to capture a visitors attention within 10 seconds of them landing on it.

This is the average time it takes a new visitor to decide if a page is worth exploring or leaving.

I’m going to dive into the detail of our SEO strategy in a later post.

2- Traffic through Blog content

This is one of the most important channels for driving traffic to our site. We are running three blogs simultaneously under the Event Marketing umbrella. Two of them focus on strategic level thoughts on launching and promoting events. The third blog directs the readers to useful tips, tricks, resources and links for managing and promoting their events.

The focus of the blogs is to create quality content that is useful for everyone who is planning on marketing or launching their events. The blogs link out to our main site, whereas our social media pages link out to our blogs.

We’ll drive traffic to the blogs via those social pages and also by linking and commenting to authority blogs in this domain (or similar domains). The idea is to get noticed by people who will benefit the business.

3- Traffic through Social Media Campaigns

Our Social Media Campaign for launching Events Listed is fairly complex. I’m just going to touch upon it here and add details related to the individual steps to our Social Media Strategies blog for clarifications. We’re building social networks of prospects within different social networking sites (such as Facebook) and syndicating them to interlink. The purpose of these networks is going to be to target specific early adopters and thought-leaders in sub-markets and get them to visit our Blogs. These sub-markets are all those niches that can benefit from using our platform for marketing their events or launches, e.g. Conference planners, club promoters or venues. By enticing them to our blogs we would want them to become regular readers and visitor at the blogs as an introduction to the brand as a way of building credibility for who we are and what we know before inviting them to adopt our website application or services.

We target specific audiences and drive them into posts within one of the three blogs that are most suited to the line we are taking withing any of the campaigns or link bait promotions we will be promoting throughout the social networks we are slowly building.

Our social networking and media campaigns are interlinked with our blog content strategy, in a way that can be best described with a fishing analogy: the social networks being our fishing grounds and our blogs being our fishing nets (sales funnels) - we drive visitors (fish) into the funnel. The funnel is designed to add value to even the most experienced event planners and over time it forms a clearer and more streamlined path (like a fishing-net drag line that creates a tunnel through which the fish are swept into the haul basket and scooped up). Our path leads our visitors into a somewhat disorganized yet interesting series of posts to attract their interest - and then it winds into a structured format that you are just entering at the stage of this post which is going to lead you into receiving cutting edge, invaluable resourced knowledge, insight , tips and tricks that equates to real value at no cost (The Free line). At the same time what we have decided to do for this launch is to build the content around our very own website launch bringing subscribers into our inner circle where we share not only our launch secrets but at the same time our intention is that they become both familiar and affiliated with our brand though out the process; This process leads to our product launch where we intend for a lot of subscribers will migrate onto our new platform for social networking and event marketing without thinking twice.

We attract a lot of early adopters who bring with them a lot of small fish who will never earn us any money as they are unlikely to sell tickets off their event pages. However, the small fish bring with them the big fish.

We monetize the application at the very end of the freeline by charging all the big fish a percentage of ticket and merchandising sales off their event pages.

4- Traffic through Joint Venture launch campaigns

At this formal partnership end, we’ll run JV campaigns on the parallel. If you’re interested in details of these campaigns, we’ll follow a case study of how we do this with one Joint Venture partner in the Social Media Strategies blog. We’ll demonstrate a partnership process with a Sydney backpacker operator that has a list of 18,000 people throughout the world. Next we’ll also approach partner sites and businesses who have customer lists that we can use. We’ll plan and launch a joint venture video launch to drive potential partners into a sales funnel of their own. As we secure partners we will provide list owners a full swipe file of the campaign they should be sending their lists to promote our launch. They will email their lists offering them exclusive value that others can’t avail. We pay a commission to our Joint Venture partners with a share in the revenue earned by us from the customers that came through their lists.

A small tip for joint venture launch campaigns: always tale about whats in it for them with the emphasis on the win-win component. Show proof of forecast benefits for them & be transparent about your gains.

Eventslisted.com - Social media campaigns

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Our social media campaigns run simultaneous to the email marketing, blogging and all other prelaunch campaigns. The social networking aspect of our campaign begins before we even launch the blogs and moves along the launch timeline long after the official launch in October. In some ways, you can consider it to be independent of the rest of the elements of the campaign because of its marked significance to the success of the launch.

In many ways, the social media campaign is the heart beat of our launch – it’s what keeps everything going.

We want to invest in the amount of time and attention it deserves. We have an entire blog dedicated to social media marketing strategies that event marketers or business owners can apply to their businesses. We’ll be covering details of how we’re leveraging social media for the upcoming Events Listed launch in that blog as well as touching on the outline of it here in the follow a launch strategies posts.

For now, I’ll just briefly mention the underlying philosophy behind this social media ampaign without diving into the details of the individual tools that we’re using (please check our social media strategies blog for that).

The concept is that you can’t force or fool people to your products, you have to patiently convert them into leads one at a time if you want your leads to have a good chance of becoming good customers. The power of social media is that it allows us to get to those prospects easily and engage at their levels. The idea would be to network, network and network – have conversations with them. These prospects emerge from our conversations, followings, friending strategies, fans on the online social networks.

We’ll have a presence in multiple social media networks with a consistency in our image and conversations. We’ll have Facebook pages, Linked in profiles, Twitter updates, Squidoo lenses and many other online places. We’ll work with the prospects to get the conversations started and draw them into the leads lists, if interested.

Eventslisted.com - Blog content strategy

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What we say to the world and how we say it, helps defines a lot of things for us. It defines how we are perceived by our audiences. It defines how we will be remembered. It defines our thought mechanism and business ethics. It defines are motives and objectives. It defines what principles we value and support. It defines our interactions with the world around us. It defines how we can make a difference in somebody’s life or work. And most of all, it defines who we are. Here are some things that have under consideration, when we’re baring our thoughts to the world.

Multiple Blogs: We are running three blogs simultaneously under the Event Marketing umbrella. Two of them focus on strategic level thoughts on launching and promoting events. The third blog directs the readers to useful tips, tricks, resources and links for managing and promoting their events. The idea here is to segment and customize the blogs for three different types of readers and mindsets. All three should benefit from the individual blogs as well as find it useful to follow the entire Event Line set for being in the know. Despite drawing these lines between the three different types of content, we have ensured that the overall direction of the three blogs remains the same. Our domain of expertise is event marketing and we try not to deviate much from this area – so despite the fact that we have multiple blogs, we have a focused approach.

Quality Content: The purpose and effort of the three blogs will go waste if they are not useful to the targeted readers. The quality of content thus becomes our core focus in our blogging campaign. We have ways to ensure that the content gets out consistently and maintains a level of quality throughout the launch campaign. The focus of the blogs is to create quality content that is useful for everyone who is planning on marketing or launching their events.

Alignment to Launch Roadmap: The blog content is distributed and planned in a way so that it complements the overall launch roadmap. It starts with little chunks of information unfolding the entire story behind the launch.

Increase subscriptions: A target from the blog content is to get as many RSS and email subscriptions as possible. The email subscribers will automatically be added to our lists. The increase in subscriptions should be a natural consequence of the quality of content.

Drive traffic to blog: We’ll drive traffic to the blogs through our social networking strategies and also by linking and commenting to authority blogs within the domain. The idea is to get noticed by people who can benefit from the application and who will in turn benefit the business.

Aim to become Authority Blog: A motive of the blog is to slowly gain credibility and interest in the crowds and become an authority blog in the event marketing domain. This will be done by focusing on this niche and by putting up regular content which is valued by the readers.

Search engine optimized for market domains: We have a 6 month SEO plan to get the blog and website content up the ranks for selected keyword phrases.

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