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There are two phases to the promotion rollout for our new Video Game Reviews blog, which are…

• Link Bait Promotion
• Index Promotion

We usually have four phases which also include…

• Money Promotion
• Maintenance Promotion

…the difference is we are going to be selling this blog very soon and as such we do not have the time to layout the entire process. The initial “Link Bait” promotion is to get the site to take off as fast as it can by using a viral element that takes full advantage of social web communities. Then once that is initiated we then move into a focused campaign on promoting the index page. These are what we will walk you through over the next few days.

The “Money Promotion” is when we start to really monetize the blog with affiliate reviews of different products and or services and focus the promotion on those pages. The last phase is the “Maintenance Promotion” where we rotate through promoting both the index page and other “deep link” pages of our blog. We believe it is important to focus on a 50/50 split of gaining links to both your index page and other deep linked pages on your blog. Our goal is to try and maintain a minimum link growth of one new one way link a day (average 30 a month). This is very easy to achieve if you create solid content, people will link to it naturally and that can leave you to focus your promotion on your “Money Pages”.

Now before a few of you comment below or email us requesting that we also share about “Money” and “Maintenance” promotions, do not worry about it, we have every intention of sharing this as well… but not right away, so you might want to subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you are notified

Link Bait Promotion

The reason we put so much attention on creating a quality “Link Bait” page is because it is so vitally important that your link growth be as viral as possible. We mentioned this a few posts back but think it is essential to repeat it. Promoting your blog is like pulling the string on a kite you are trying to launch into the sky, when you first pull on it, the kite shoots off into the air but if there is nothing (no wind) to carry it up high then the kite simply drops back down to the ground like a rock. So often we see people putting loads of effort into promoting something that is plain and simply a piece of crap. If you are not going to take the time to do this right, then your results are going to be poor. Do not just promote a keyword optimized article written by some guy with a name you can not pronounce that can barely speak a word of English and is only focused on making sure your keyword phrase is at 6%.

We do not want to get into detail on the “Link Bait” page as we have talked about that enough in prior posts but we hope that you can see clearly that quality is vitally important.

With our blog GamerzReviewz, our link bait page is focused on a contest and we now have three tasks we need to focus on. The first is to put together a viral system that will encourage readers to share our contest and link to use. The second is to start placing news of the contest in different areas that will start to get the ball rolling. The third is to find joint venture partners that would be willing to promote our contest to a targeted list of video gamers.

Part 1 –> VIRAL Marketing

Viral marketing is the process of creating an initiative that when done correct will have the consumers in your market spread the word. There is nothing more powerful in marketing then having the consumers recommending you to others. The challenge here is that it is not an easy system because what you might think is great, is not a shared view with others…. especially if you are entering a market you are not really familiar with. We felt that offering a free video game console was pretty much a no brainer for a video game market but we needed to set it up so that people would be encouraged to spread the word. The challenge with a contest is the more people that enter, the less your chances to win are, so we needed to create a very worthwhile incentive to get as many people as possible to do more then just the bare minimum.

We tested a few different options here and it is important that you test different options. For example we at first put an option for people to post in video game forums but this was not effective because it broke the rules of most of the forums and the posts were looked at as spam and were deleted. We had some apprehension about this strategy from the start, but it is always wise to test things in different markets… some times they work in one and not in another. Since we were watching this very close, we were able to pull this very quickly when we saw it was not effective and the last thing we wanted was to be labeled a spammer in the communities that we were targeting.

We brainstormed many different options and prioritized them in order of what we felt were the best. We did not want to add every option at once as this can cause a lot of confusion by giving too many options and also makes it harder to track. The one common element that we needed to focus on however was that for people to enter into the contest, they had to perform an action that added value to the blog, such as becoming a subscriber to the blog or providing a one way link.

IMPORTANT –> Do NOT just copy what works on one blog and think it will work for yours. Each market is so very different and one of your options might be something that barely anyone in your market is even capable of doing. Look at where a lot of actions are taking place for your market and figure out how to tap into it. For example the social community PlugIM.com is a fairly powerful tool to use but it is only focused in the IM (internet marketing) market and therefore having one of the criteria to be using this community when your market is focused on a completely unrelated market would be a huge waste.

Once we had our list of criteria we then needed to explain it as effectively as possible which means in as little words as possible. Remember you are dealing with a media that allows for great impatience because if your reader is encouraged to click away, they will. That might even mean hitting the back button in their browser which means you lose them. Once we had the criteria worded correctly we posted it and we also made sure to set a couple reminders in place for those that take the initial step of registering. Once registered the people are brought to a “Thank You” page and we needed to make sure that this page reminded them about how they could get even more chances to win. We also added a thanks for registering email into the system, so once subscribed they were reminded there as well.

The next step, which we will post about tomorrow, is to start getting the word out the the right people to get this viral process kicked off.

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