Exception To The Rule? Unconventional Marketing Methods
One of my favorite things to do in this business is running live tests on what works and what doesn't.
Running split tests on
everything from traffic sources to...
Banner ads, article headlines and
auto responding emails and more.
Figuring out what is working and why,
is like discovering
something exciting and new.
Once you have tested and found a working formula, the next
step is duplicate it until it no longer works.
With my blogs, it is the same strategy.
ome that I create are doing really well and others that I thought were going to be rock stars are absolute failures.
That's the nature of this business right?
You really don't know until you've put it out there.
What Type Of Blog Is Working Now?
Do you have a working formula right now, and did you try several
methods of blogging first before you settled on one that worked for you?
Are your blogs a
Review style?
Or perhaps you're Vlogging, meaning creating videos on a particular subject?
Does writing long- form, wordy
articles get you the results you're looking for?
All of these styles of content creation seem to work well, some better than others but
there has been success stories with all of them.
One of my favorites called WaitButWhy.com
It's a successful long-form blog that covers multiple topics, basically an opinion blog. It's defined by its brilliant and clever writing that engages the reader and its use of little cartoon stick men throughout the site for illustrating their points.
This website has an estimated traffic of 4,000,000 visitors per month.
Not too bad huh?
There are a few types of blogs I've been researching for a while now
that sort of defy the norm or "rules" of blogging that most of
us were taught.
Especially when it comes to Google's rules.
Not only are they defying Google and pretty much any of the SEO
stuff others depend on...
These sites are thriving and
have the numbers to
back them up!
One in particular that I now frequent daily is called,
You may know of it as it is gaining a lot of attention.
When you go to this site it is pretty simple to see that
it's an affiliate store. I believe they call themselves the Internet's
shopping mall.
According to SimilarWeb, this site averages almost
3,000,000 visits a month.
Global rank of 28,892
United States rank - 8,591
I'm not sure the age of this site, except I know it pre-dates 2012.
I would estimate that between affiliate income and other advertising revenue they are bringing in a minimum of $25000 a month.
(I'm probably way off and it's likely much higher than that)
What is their angle?
They look for all the weirdest, quirkiest and most interesting products from
Amazon and a few other affiliate sites and post them with a picture and a
short description (usually tongue firmly planted in cheek humorous)
Funny, bizarre items like this cat-mech suitThen there is usually a price at the bottom and a button that says "check it out".
The check it out button is a direct affiliate link to that product.
The Genius of ThisIsWhyImBroke.com
When you look at the items that they are posting, the first question comes to mind is,
Who the hell would buy this stuff?
Some of the products are way out of most people's price range to begin with.
Sure, there are a lot of neat gift ideas, but there are a lot of products that probably, no one would buy even if they were so wealthy and bored enough to purchase.
As a student always of this business, I asked that question.
The answer I believe is that they know most people would never buy the items they
post on the site.
However, out of shear curiosity, many would click on the "check it out" button below.
The button takes them to the vendor,
like Amazon. From there, a percentage of those already on Amazon would start surfing around for possibly something that they were meaning to buy anyways.
So it is a strategy of, get them through the door and let the vendor do what they do best, selling something.
How did they get traffic initially?
My guess is that social media was their #1 traffic source in the early phase of this site. SEO doesn't really fit anywhere here, except once the traffic started coming in, Google pretty much had to rank them as an authority site.
Which is kind of funny, since it's like they gave Google the one finger salute.
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