Reaching Twice as Many Spiritual Story Lovers in 2009

For two years, I've been continuing to build the content, and traffic, for my spiritual stories website. Each year I learn new skills that help me reach more people, find and post more stories, and ultimately improve the world for all of us. Each month, I look at what's working and try to expand on that, and then work less on anything that is ineffective. However, that can only take me so far.

In 2009, I am going to double the number of monthly unique visitors to my spiritual stories website by applying 5 strategies that are not currently being used.

Strategy #1: Clickbank

I currently sell a digital program on Clickbank, but the program isn't directly related to my spiritual stories mailing list. I have integrated my affiliate program so that other people can promote my free spiritual stories website, and if the visitor ever purchases any of my Clickbank products then the affiliate gets a commission. This is an excellent opportunity for both the affiliates on Clickbank, as well as for me. I get free traffic, and when sales are made we both get paid.

I will also be searching Clickbank to recruit new affiliates who have products and services similar to mine. I plan to offer promoting their product to my list, regardless of whether they promote mine to theirs. Of course, I hope that my generocity will be reciprocated and that's part of the effectiveness of this approach to encourage them to promote my products and/or website.

Strategy #2: Ezine Advertising

This method of advertising, when done correctly is both deadly effective and surprisingly inexpensive. There's plenty of newsletters out there being run by your average person, a hobbyist who is passionate about a topic, that will happily accept a small payment in exchange for putting my advertisement in their Ezine. To find these people, I plan to use two primary approaches to find Ezines to advertise in:

a) The Directory of Ezines

This directory is over 10 years old and allows subscribers to search the database for Ezines based on topics, prices, kinds of advertisements allowed, etc. In addition to being run by a member of the Warrior Forum, It comes highly recommended by the famous internet marketer, Frank Kern. I bought a lifetime subscription several months ago, but haven't logged in since then. I keep telling my

b) Find Ezines on Google

One of the best ways to find highly targeted visitors will be for me to search Google for other websites within my niche. Then I will check out each of those sites and see which ones have Ezines and accept advertising. If I think there's excellent alignment but no advertising is offered, then I'll even contact them and ask how much they'd charge for me to advertise in their newsletter.

As an aside, if I notice they are promoting Clickbank products I may just ask if they'd like to promote my product. This eliminates my risk so that there's no up-front costs, and if it's effective then the website owner will probably try to find more ways to promote my websites and products.

Strategy #3: Build Web 2.0 Pages

I recently experimented with creating several Web 2.0 pages (e.g. Squidoo and Hubpages) to promote my Christmas stories website. The results were nothing short of phenomenal. In less than 3 months, that website went from 0 visitors upon creation, to now getting over 1,000 unique visitors per day. If I hadn't done it myself, I wouldn't believe it. Now that I've seen how powerful Web 2.0 is, I'm going to use it to massively increase the number of unique visitors to my spiritual stories website as well.

Strategy #4: Video

I also experimented with video to promote my Christmas stories website by uploading to TubeMogul and letting it distribute to other sites like YouTube and DailyMotion. But to be honest it so far has not provided significant return on that investment. To be fair though, I didn't put my all into the project and when I outsourced it I accepted marginal quality on some aspects instead of hiring purely on talent. I viewed it as a test project, so it's reasonable to expect marginal results. Maybe in time it will pick up, but for now it hasn't seemed to be very effective.

However, I have noticed that whenever there's a beautiful video with good music and inspirational text, it goes viral very quickly. Instead of creating several okay videos like I did before, I'll focus on creating one very very good video that everybody wants to share with as many people as possible. This alone could double my traffic if done correctly.

Strategy #5: Outsourcing

Okay, so this isn't directly tied to traffic generation. However, since I'm already setting lofty goals that require a lot of manual effort, I plan to outsource many of the tasks. I'll still be doing them also (especially the content creation), but some of the research and more mundane aspects of marketing I can let others handle for me. On other projects I've had good success with ELance and RentACoder . In my experience, Elance has been better for non-technical projects while RentAcoder has been better for technical work.

Also, I can't ignore the fact that I don't even know how to create video! Therefore, the outsourcing is actually a requirement to not just handle tasks I don't have time to do, but also tasks like video that I don't have the skills to do.

Conclusion...

Honestly speaking, I am probably setting my sights too low to just double my monthly unique visitors. I think if I combine all of the strategies above, maybe I'll triple or even quadruple that instead. The only challenge is, some of that isn't sustainable like the Ezine Advertising - so while I may get a quick boost from that, it will be the other automated, more permanent "set it and forget it" kinds of traffic generating strategies that ultimately keep the new unique visitors flowing in.

My goal is lofty, but my resolve is very strong. I've already announced to my newsletter subscribers that I plan to quit my day job in 2009 and be of service to them full-time. I guess in a way, I could have also said my New Year's Resolution was to quit my day job, but I think it's going to take a lot more than I've written about in this article to make that a reality!