Internet Marketing Strategies and the Power of Building a Tribe

Your main goal in Internet marketing, in addition to creating a strong brand, should be to generate high traffic to your website. Without a constant flow of traffic exposing individuals to your business and your brand, you have no business.

Written Oct 08, 2010, read 1698 times since then.

In addition to creating a strong personal brand, your main goal in Internet marketing should be to generate a high-volume of traffic to your website. Without a constant flow of traffic exposing individuals to your business and your brand, you have no business. One of the ways to accomplish this is to utilize social media to drive traffic to your blog. There are so many different ways to use social media from Twitter and Facebook to YouTube, etc. If you are not using social media to promote your product, business, or brand, you are not marketing effectively or efficiently.

Social media allows the marketer to benefit from free marketing by leveraging its relationships in the community. You want people to market your product and brand for you without you having to do all the work. It is an efficient form of marketing that has the ability to reach many people. One of the main objectives of using social media is to direct people back to your personal blog. Whether you are advertising a new blog post, promoting a new product, trying to generate affiliate traffic, or whatever it is, the objective is the same. The more content syndication you can create between the various social networks, the more search engines will recognize you as an authority in your particular industry and therefore rank you higher in organic search.

If you are marketing online, which any business owner should be, you should absolutely focus on building your "list". Your "list" is a list of people who have opted-in to receiving correspondence from you. They filled out a contact form, or opted-in to receive a free gift of some sort from your website or blog so now you have their e-mail which is vital to your future marketing communications.

Let us say for example, that you have 100 people in your e-mail list. You send out regular communications to those hundred people in the hopes that some of them will eventually bite and purchase your product, become an affiliate marketer, or sign up for your services (depending on the nature of your business). You do not want to be "selling" to these individuals constantly. You do want to be providing consistent email contact (at least once per week) providing content that your prospective costumers and/or followers find useful and really work on building a relationship with them. You should focus on spending 90% of your time providing valuable content relevant to your followers, and 10% of the time selling.

Now, let's say you have built relationships with other bloggers in your niche, business owners, and even customers who are sharing your content with their followers. You have just exposed your content to an exponentially greater number of people. This is the power of a “Tribe”--there is power in numbers. The more relationships you can build on the Internet from other fans of your business, bloggers in your niche, or even existing or potential consumers who benefit from the content you provide, the more chance you have of content syndication. Your goal is to have as many people talking about you, tweeting about you, and linking back to you as possible in order to create a strong brand and generate traffic. Now it is obvious that not all of these individuals will purchase your product or sign up with your business’s services, however you now have the ability to consistently market to these individuals in the future.

The question is how do you maintain your tribe and keep them loyal to you? The answer is by creating relationships with these individuals and providing valuable content on a consistent and frequent basis. The more you can help them out, the more they will help you out. You should approach your Internet marketing as a mutually beneficial situation.

Learn more about the author, Joanie Dhillon.

Posted by Taylor Ellwood, Portland, Oregon | Oct 11, 2010

I actually find email marketing less effective. While it goes to a targeted list of people, the main issue to consider is how much email those people are already getting. While I agree its important to produce consistent and useful information, it's also important to consider if the medium for sending out that information is still relevant.
Posted by Joanie Dhillon, Seattle, Washington | Oct 11, 2010

Hi Taylor,

You are right, email marketing is not an effective tool when you haven't built a strong relationship with your followers. That is the purpose of building a "list" is to be able to build a long-term relationship with the people on your list through providing valuable content. Over time, these individuals begin to trust you and see you as a leader in your niche market and become loyal customers. It is a long term strategy not a short one but in the long run can lead to very strong profits. I have seen this myself and it is a tool that is very relevant and used in internet marketing by top marketers. I didn't invent it, wish I did. :) Obviously, it's not the only tool you want to be using, you want to be linking to these same followers through various social media platforms. it's all about branding and positioning yourself, or your business's brand as a leader in the market, providing content that your followers find valuable.

I communicate with my lists 1-2 times per week and have found a very loyal following which I have been able to monetize through product launches and affiliate campaigns.

Thanks for your comments.
Posted by Steve Kozy, Nashville, Tennessee | Oct 12, 2010

Hi Joanie,

I found your article very helpful, and well written.

I especially loved this part of your response to the first comment: "Over time, these individuals begin to trust you and see you as a leader in your niche market and become loyal customers. It is a long term strategy not a short one but in the long run can lead to very strong profits."

I like you; you're smart.

Please keep writing. Good Luck at Every Turn, Steve

Steve Kozy, The Software Knowledge Co, Inc.
Posted by Jim Dickeson, Mercer Island, Washington | Oct 12, 2010

I share Taylor's concern for bombarding people with too much email, so I try to limit my broadcasts to once per month. Maybe it's working, because my open and click through rates are much higher than my supposed (I don't really know how my email servcie knows) industry average. Also, I've had very few opt-outs.

While I can't say that email marketing has been a boon for business, I recently had a pleasant surprise. I was short on content for my October mailing, so I slapped in a blog post from September. Not the whole thing; just a snippit with a "click to read more". That blog post was reprinted by someone else, giving appropriate credit and links, thank you. But more importantly, I could tell from the link provided that the reposter got it, not directly from my blog, but via my email, as it had the email services tracking data in it. And it wasn't just my snippit, but the entire post, meaning that the reposter had clicked through from the email to my blog. Furthermore, this reposter is not even on my mail list, meaning that one of my subscribers thought enough of it to forward to him. Lastly, I could tell from my analytics that a lot of new traffic hit my site from that reposter.

So don't write off email marketing and a small subscrption list too quickly. At least not until you have provided content worth of forwarding and reposting.

Jim Dickeson
Import Export Geeks
Posted by John Davies, Bothell, Washington | Oct 12, 2010

I also do the once per month email. I get soooo much of it I can't open it all. You mentioned "One of the main objectives of using social media is to direct people back to your personal blog." How is this done?
Posted by Jim Dickeson, Mercer Island, Washington | Oct 12, 2010

John, I can't speak for how Joanie would answer that, but social media is a broad topic and there are many answers to your question.

One way I just did above is include a link back to my site (not my blog, but my main site, because that is where I make money). I used my company name as the link's anchor text, although this could be done in the body of some text by cleverly working in your key words and making them the anchor text in a link. (Send me a message through my profile if you want to know how; I'm having trouble demonstrating the html code in this space where Biznik's software overrides things.)

Obviously, readers will see a clickable link. But Google may (depends on what the blog software allows) see this as a very popular site (biznik) linking to my site. Enough of these out there will boost your page ranking.

I also have videos I made on YouTube. YouTube, owned by Google, is arguably the second most popular search engine, after Google. And Google is not doing something called blended search, where they will return YouTube videos in regular non-video search results. Videos grab searchers attention, they watch the video and the video has a link to my site. And if your video goes viral, which is even easier that winning the lottery (which, if you think about it, isn't saying much), then people email lins to your video to all of their friends.

Oh I could go on, but let's let a real SEO expert chime in.
Posted by Melanie Benson Strick, Chatsworth, California | Oct 13, 2010

Great article. I'm very much a tribe-based success story -- my communities tend to generate raving fans. Knowing how to create that from scratch is very helpful, thanks!

Melanie Benson Strick
Posted by Joanie Dhillon, Seattle, Washington | Oct 13, 2010

Thanks for your comments everyone.

Jim - Great success story! Thanks for sharing. Great to hear you have low opt-outs and high open rates--that's what you want to see!

You have to remember that those individuals opted in to receive correspondence from you. I personally don't mind when people opt out of my list because they aren't the people I clearly need to be connecting with and most likely aren't opening my emails and/or finding value in them. So it's not a loss to me. I know I don't spam and only provide valuable content and if they don't find it of value then that is okay.

Jim - Thanks for addressing John's question. I appreciate your feedback and advise as I'm sure he does too. You are absolutely correct in saying there are endless ways to drive traffic to your website or blog (whichever you use to generate traffic/sales). YouTube videos are an amazing marketing tool that people should really tap into no matter what your niche or area of expertise.

And what Jim mentioned about the video going viral, which is what you want is so powerful for driving traffic to your blog. That is what my blog post discussed when I refer to "Content Syndication". People who see your content i.e. video or blog post who then "share" it with their friends and social network and then someone from their social network shares it and it gets sent out to their entire network, so forth and so on. I'm sure you are starting to see the POWER of content syndication.

That is why building relationships with people on the internet via Facebook, Twitter, Biznik or the many other social platforms is essential in getting them to syndicate your content for you thereby exponentially increasing the traffic that reaches your website or blog. And we all know, that more traffic equates to more sales.

I call all my content syndicators my "Tribe" because we each assist each other in sharing one anothers content creating a mutually beneficial situation. Remember, share other's content first and it will always come back to you!

Melanie - great to hear your Tribe success! Keep up the great work.
Posted by Joanie Dhillon, Seattle, Washington | Oct 13, 2010

I should also mention that FaceBook is on track to being the #1 search engine in no time! There is HUGE buzz about FB on the internet right now and it's a great way to both build relationships and market your product with paid ads.

This is a great way to market your link by simply placing it onto your profile page under "websites". You do NOT want to spam people in your network with your link because remember it is a social network and people are looking to connect and build relationships, not be sold to. I then go and "friend" people within my niche who share similar likes and interests. I follow top leaders in my niche and add their friends. I am then able to generate a ton of traffic to my sites to which a % convert to leads and ultimately sales.

Another tip is to write and publish articles with specific keywords and your website link attached. (I will be writing an article or even hosting a webinar on article marketing soon). AMAZING tool to drive traffic to your blog if you do it right.
Posted by Elvis Arias, Jersey City, New Jersey | Oct 15, 2010

Great facebook tips Joanie.