For most stock promoters, the cost of buying large, effective email lists is becoming prohibitive. I know of some entities that are spending tens of thousands of dollars a week to refresh their email lists for promotion. Another thing about buying lists and using them is unless you have a really good source, most email lists are ineffective for stock promotion.
If you don’t have 20 thousand dollars lying around, then I have some ideas for you…
It all started about a year ago when I basically reverse-engineered how many of the big promoters build email lists. There is nothing overly complex about how they do it. I have used the same methodology here at HotStockChat.com for years. Granted, my efforts have not been as big as some but it is effective nonetheless.
The Process:
It is a given that you have to have a website for people to sign up for your email list. So the problem is: How do you get people to come to your site and sign up?
I will guarantee you that this is an important part of the puzzle. The fact of the matter is that about 95% of stock promotion sites have little or no traffic. I used the search term “stock promotion” on Google yesterday and found that there were 9,900,000 results and out of those results only a small number have websites that are inside Alexa’s top million sites.
The reason most of these sites perform poorly is because they are “unfindable”. So we have a chicken and egg situation here: A site can’t be found because there is nothing on the site to get it found.
Your site has to be easily found; you can increase the “findability” of your site in the following ways:
- Make sure your on page (or onsite) SEO parameters are in good shape such as, descriptive page title, good description and alt-text in place for each image or graphic.
- Design a news release campaign; this is a great way to get people onto your site and build your offsite SEO as well. The more inbound links to your site, the higher it ranks which makes it easier to find. There are many low cost and free news release services.
- More complex but effective as well is setting up a blog on your site. All things being equal, a site with engaging content will get more visitors than one without a blog. A few stock promotion sites have blogs but they are nothing more than copy/paste of client news releases. Some blogs even have their comments closed so it’s really not a blog at all…
- Articles; if you have specialized knowledge about your business, you can write 250-600 word articles. If the article is approved you will get a nice, high authority inbound link to your site. One, high authority link is worth more than many low authority link. Many promoters band together and put links to each other’s sites but if none of the sites have any traffic, what are you accomplishing?
A good thing to do is when people do sign up for your email list; make sure you have a nice auto-responder set up to thank them for signing up. A lot of people ignore this. Remember, it’s not the big thing that you do with your site that gets people to sign up, it’s all the little, value-added things you do that will make the difference.
Advertising and Pay-per-Click
If you do not have a big budget, this sort of thing is really outside of your abilities to do on a big scale. I also know that there is a limit to the quality of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns because of PPC fraud. One stock promoter’s horror story. Another problem with advertising and PPC is that once your campaign is over with, your site and links disappear. PPC is like crack cocaine, once you go down that path, it’s hard to get off of it. What provided a few hundred visitors a day now disappears unless you renew the campaign. Advertising and PPC campaigns do not build inbound links to your site. So, you may only be on page 1 of Google while you are paying for it; once your money runs out you return to oblivion. An organic campaign of building legitimate inbound links to your site lasts for months and years.
If you want more information on our services such as help with your website, news releases or anything else covered here, see our services page.
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