MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

In a hyper com­pet­i­tive mar­ket online are there ways to gen­er­ate traf­fic that don’t cost you an arm and a leg? We are pleased to reveal the answer to this ques­tion is YES! This reveal­ing case study shows how to gen­er­ate traf­fic to your sites with­out fork­ing out on unnec­es­sary, extor­tion­ate PPC adver­tis­ing costs.

The fol­low­ing case study comes from a one-on-one site makeover between Vishen Lakhi­ani and one of our clients who pur­chased our Ecom­merce Strat­egy Course. (the Site Makeover is included as part of the program)

The Client: A Nutri­tional Sup­ple­ments Retailer that Wants to Move Online but is Being Killed by the Highly Com­pet­i­tive Cost of Adver­tis­ing on Google

The Solu­tion: How We Uncov­ered a Low­Cost Way to Gain a Com­pet­i­tive Advan­tage and Out Do the Com­pe­ti­tion Using Micro-Sites, Blogs and SEO

The Com­pany — Nutrisite (name changed for confidentiality)

The com­pany we spoke to ear­lier this week wishes to remain anony­mous, so for the sake of this arti­cle we’ll refer to them as Nutrisite. Nutrisite is a retailer of all kinds of nutri­tional sup­ple­ments for med­i­c­i­nal pur­poses. Tony, the founder of Nutrisite, has been run­ning the com­pany for over four years now and until recently he only had an offline presence.

Using only offline tools he’s acquired a data­base of 39,000 clients of which 13,000 are reg­u­lar cus­tomers. Prod­ucts are gen­er­ally bought from them using a cat­a­logue and a newslet­ter sent out through direct mail. They have a solid profit mar­gin per cus­tomer of around 25% on its products.

Get­ting Online

Tony’s goal was to develop an online pres­ence which means the poten­tial to expand the mar­ket he could reach out to, WHILE increas­ing leads and sales on a truly expo­nen­tial level.

They have already fin­ished their web­site and the next step is to get it fully oper­a­tional. Here’s what it looks like.

The Web­site

Nutrisite clearly has a lot to offer — but they are new online — have vir­tu­ally no nat­ural search rank­ings and were los­ing money on PPC.

How could they get afford­able traf­fic while build­ing a com­pet­i­tive edge?

The first thing we told Tony was that to be a suc­cess he needed to con­cen­trate on 3 things…

3 Things To Opti­mize For a Suc­cess­ful Web Business

1) Get­ting Traffic

2) Get­ting High Con­ver­sion rates

3) Get­ting Great Aver­age Value Per Customer

Vishen sug­gested that Tony Focus Solely on these met­rics so that he keeps his eyes and atten­tion on the key things that can make or break his online presence.

Tony knows how to mon­e­tize his value per cus­tomer and has a good aver­age value per cus­tomer already.

His prob­lem was #1 and #2. He’d stud­ied the Mind­Val­ley e-commerce labs and had a fair idea about #2 — we’ll cover how to get high con­ver­sion rates in another case study at a later date anyway.

So… #1 ( TRAFFIC ) is where the prob­lem lies — in such a highly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket how can a mar­keter gen­er­ate traf­fic with­out spend­ing a for­tune on Google AdWords?

2 Most Com­mon and Usual Ways To Gen­er­ate Traffic

Google Ads– The com­pe­ti­tion on Google Adwords is so intense in the indus­try, for exam­ple just for the key­word prostate there are 10 ads there to com­pete with. And there are 12 adver­tis­ers already for key­word phrase diges­tion dis­or­der. To com­pete on this play­ing field there is likely to be a bid­ding war for the top spots. The only win­ners in this case will be Google. (I’m still kick­ing myself for not buy­ing their stock when it was $100 a share , %#$@!)

SEO Opti­miza­tion– It’s pos­si­ble to find your­self high up google if you find niches in mar­kets and tar­get these key­words. But Tony’s site is new — how could he rapidly get good key­word placements?

Mul­ti­ple Traf­fic Tactics

Tony had also been intro­duced to the idea of co-registration as a way of increas­ing his email list. This has worked for mar­keters in the past but we do have some con­cerns over this tactic.

Our Response:

“What we dis­cov­ered from exper­i­ment­ing with this in the past is while co-registration does build your mail­ing list, what hap­pens is some­times these clients don’t rec­og­nize you — they signed up on site A and they get an email from site B, often you get treated as a spam­mer and you get extremely low con­ver­sion rates. Being seen as a spam­mer is not a good thing if you’re look­ing to build a long term business”

What we advised Tony to do was this: MICROSITES

Our Tac­tics To Gen­er­ate Traf­fic In A Highly Com­pet­i­tive Mar­ket — Use A High Level Microsite Strategy

Build A Microsite

When peo­ple type in a key­word in Google, vir­tu­ally all the time they are look­ing for infor­ma­tion. By build­ing a microsite it’s pos­si­ble for any­body to develop cred­i­bil­ity, an air of author­ity, excel­lent con­tent and vital information.

In this case if we tar­get a spe­cific niche you’ll find sites, such as con­sti­pa­tion advice below (sorry for the choice), with infor­ma­tion that fea­tures highly on google. This exam­ple is one of a good site with con­tent, how­ever it doesn’t truly fit into the cat­e­gory of a microsite. The site has been over-engineered and would have taken a long time to develop.

The beauty of a microsite is that it can be designed and launched with a lot of con­tent within the space of a day has­sle free.

We sug­gested that Tony should start using Microsites as the strat­egy to get bet­ter PPC con­ver­sions AND over time, build his key­word rank­ings so he begins to get search traffic.

His com­pe­ti­tion on PPC was fierce — but none were truly expe­ri­enced and we think a tar­geted Microsite strat­egy might help him dom­i­nate his niches.

Take the key­word “con­sti­pa­tion”. Rather than send­ing traf­fic to a sim­ple land­ing page show­ing NuriSite’s range of con­sti­pa­tion prod­ucts, we sug­gested Tony directs the traf­fic to a Microsite focused on NOTHING but con­sti­pa­tion advice.

What does a Microsite Look Like?

Here is a sam­ple microsite we cre­ated. It’s run­ning on a Word­press blog so it’s really easy to update. There are 3 areas to note.

• The Signup Form.
• The Blog Articles
• The Ads

The site was setup on Feb­ru­ary 1. By the end of the month we were get­ting 5,000 impres­sions per week and were show­ing up on the first or sec­ond page of Google for sev­eral keywords.

For exam­ple — this is one of the key­words we were tar­get­ing “John Assaraf” (He’s a moti­va­tional speaker and entre­pre­neur). Within 2 weeks, we were on the 2nd page of Google for that key­word. While other adver­tis­ers were bid­ding on the key­word, we were get­ting free traffic.

So really, the Microsite is pretty much a blog. With one key dif­fer­ence — you add a signup box to cap­ture leads.

Let’s take a closer look at all 3 areas.

The Three Most Impor­tant Areas of a Microsite.

A Blog

First, we sug­geted Tony put up a blog and add around 20 arti­cles related to the search term “con­sti­pa­tion”. Find­ing arti­cles with repub­lish­ing rights is easy. We’ll cover these in more details later. We showed Tony how it takes a mere 10 mins to get 1 arti­cle up when you use the right free tools. The arti­cles are impor­tant for sev­eral reasons:

1. They will help with Search Engine Mar­ket­ing — espe­cially if Tony pays atten­tion to key­word opti­miza­tion within the articles
2. Tony’s Google Land­ing Page score will likely improve. Google assigns a “score” to land­ing pages based on con­tent among other fac­tors. When you’re bid­ding on a key­word like con­sti­pa­tion — hav­ing a domain with tons of rich con­tent related to the key­word can the­o­ret­i­cally boost your Google land­ing page score and allow you to under­bid com­peti­tors for the same position.
3. The arti­cles help lend an air of cred­i­bil­ity to the site — this means that any ads Tony dis­plays on the site will be seen as a trusted rec­om­men­da­tion and should have a higher CTR.

A Signup Form

Along­side the arti­cles we rec­om­mend Tony adds a signup form request­ing peo­ple to signup for a spe­cial white paper on “Top 10 Ways to Ease Con­sti­pa­tion” — or any related topic.

THe signup form should ask for ONLY the first­name and last­name. The sec­ond page of the form should then ask for the address. In Tony’s case the address is crit­i­cal as he makes money via cat­a­logue marketing.

Ads for Tony’s Products

Along the signup form and arti­cles — he should dis­play ads for his prod­ucts related to eas­ing con­sti­pa­tion. The CTR on these ads will be MUCH higher because to the aver­age browser, they are now on a infor­ma­tional site on con­sti­pa­tion — they feel like they’re see­ing rec­om­mended advice rather than bla­tant ads.

Now we sug­gested that Tony repeat this process for 10 — 20 of his top sell­ing prod­ucts. For each, build a tar­geted Microsite around the niche and push the prod­ucts via the site.

Is this hard and time con­sum­ing? Nope. Takes us 5 hours per Microsite once you learn the right way.

It’s SO Easy

Tools such as Word­Press and Win­dows Live Writer make it incred­i­bly easy to develop con­tent and make it stress free to man­age your information.

Word­Press is a free pub­lish­ing plat­form that has great usabil­ity. We firmly believe in its mis­sion state­ment– it delivers:

“Word­Press is what you use when you want to work with your blog­ging soft­ware, not fight it.”

Win­dows Live Writer is a free, down­load­able pro­gram that will help you include rich con­tent in your blog posts and know exactly what your blog will look like before you pub­lish it to the Web. It’s one of the eas­i­est pro­grams I have ever used.

I’m a Mac user. Yet I keep a PC next to me — JUST SO I CAN USE WINDOWS LIVE WRITER. Sadly, Microsoft has yet to release the Mac ver­sion

Screen­shot below:

Get­ting Free Qual­ity Con­tent For Your Microsite

This is remark­ably easy as well — no sur­prises there . You can use Google Advanced Search to get free, qual­ity con­tent that you can put up on your site in a flash.

Here’s how:

Google Advanced Search is located just to the right of the search bar on the main page. Once you’ve selected advanced search you can find infor­ma­tion on a cer­tain sub­ject, in this case con­sti­pa­tion ( sorry once again). You can make sure this mate­r­ial is avail­able to use by select­ing infor­ma­tion that is ‘free to use and share com­mer­cially’ located on the right hand side.

So there it is, it’s really that sim­ple. You can start a microsite today!

The Final result can be a Word­Press blog with XXX num­ber of pages and arti­cles. In our tests we have found that when you keep in mind search engine opti­miza­tion you can very rapidly get the blog top rank­ings in a short space of time.

BUT IT DOES NOT STOP THERE — THERE’S MORE…

OK we’ve shown you the value of build­ing a microsite, BUT this is not going to con­quer a highly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket like nutri­tional sup­ple­ments on its own.

Why not cre­ate your own adver­tis­ing net­work by fol­low­ing a mul­ti­ple microsite high level strategy?

Here’s where it gets extremely inter­est­ing. If there’s any part of this case study that you should pay atten­tion to it’s this. I’m going to reveal how to get more and more traf­fic with­out using PPC advertising.

Build Your Own Adver­tis­ing Net­work with a Mul­ti­ple Microsite High Level Strategy

Think Big

An inter­est­ing strat­egy Tony should pur­sue is not to set­tle for one of these microsites but to develop his own net­work of microsites. He could buy 10 to 20 domain names which focus on dif­fer­ent niches in the health and vital­ity indus­try, say con­sti­pa­tion, anti aging, prostate prob­lems, diges­tion disorders.

These microsites could form a com­plete blog­ging net­work, he could then brand this umbrella of microsites all together into one site and call it some­thing imag­i­na­tive such as Health and Vital­ity or Healthy Liv­ing. Each microsite would link to the other microsites in kind of a cir­cle and would sell the company’s products.

The beauty of this is that you’ll see your Google land­ing page scores rise rapidly within no time. Another plus of this is the way you’ve built up your email lists from every sin­gle microsite. This leads on to our next bright spark…

Newslet­ter

This mul­ti­ple microsite strat­egy is guar­an­teed to improve your mail­ing list. It makes email mar­ket­ing such an impor­tant tool as it’s now so easy to direct so much traf­fic to your own adver­tis­ing net­work sell­ing your own highly prof­itable products.

Tony could do this my pub­lish­ing a newslet­ter fea­tur­ing the best 5 or 6 arti­cles from the Healthy Liv­ing umbrella of net­works he has set up. He would fea­ture a brief snip­pet of each arti­cle to entice his read­ers in, then the read­ers would have to click on the links to read the rest of the arti­cles that they are so hooked on.

The Newslet­ter of course will be a dig­i­tal com­ple­ment to his cat­a­logue and will allow him to sell more of his health products.

Proven Results

This kind of tac­tic has deliv­ered proven results time after time for some of our clients.

We like this idea because it helps you estab­lish a long term brand and allows you to break your depen­dency on Adwords.

Related Arti­cles

Get­ting Traffic »

Use­ful Links

• Word­Press »

• Win­dows Live Writer Download »

• Traf­fic Secrets | Traf­fic Secrets 2.0 on Mar­ket­ing Squeeze »

How to Learn More on Microsites and Traf­fic Generation:

The con­cepts of Microsites, Blog Mar­ket­ing and Con­tent for SEO will be added as new mod­ules to our Con­ver­sion Tac­tics Course. The new course is being released this sum­mer. All cur­rent cus­tomers will auto­mat­i­cally be upgraded. The price will also be going up (to $895) as we’ll be adding videos, soft­ware and tons more train­ing modules.

How­ever, here’s a tip.…. if you buy the course today — you can get the cur­rent ver­sion for less than $300 and you’ll auto­mat­i­cally get the 2007 ver­sion worth $895 this July. That’s a mas­sive savings.

And yes — with the cur­rent course, you’ll still get a ONE HOUR site makeover, such as the one we gave to Tony of Nutrisite. This alone is worth thousands.

Visit this link to make a Smart Deci­sion »

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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