Trends! – Can they impact Marketing?
tie-dyed clothing
slinky
disco
They are all trends, fads, what’s hot at a certain time. Trends come and go, but while they are around – WOW – are they ever an opportunity for an astute marketer. Tie your wagon to a hot trend and you can skyrocket to the top.
Hot Trend – there in lies the problem, what is hot, and what is not. And how long will it be hot, when to jump on board, and when to jump off.
That is one area where the info-marketer has a distinct advantage. Because cost of production is low to almost nothing, you can ride that trend right til the end.
That is another place where marketers – those in the know – make a mistake. Just because they are in touch, they catch the trends early. They hear all about how they go up, and they hear just as much or more about how they are not as hot as they used to be. So the inexperienced marketer jumps – jumps way too soon.
Now if you are manufacturing a warehouse full of pet rocks, you have to time that trend pretty close, or look at dumping alot of rocks back on the rock pile. But when you are marketing a non-physical product, what does it hurt to push a little more out of that trend. Get a few more dollars while you can, it may not be as much as in the past, or as easy as it was, but as long as there is profit, and you are set up anyway, keep it rolling until you are not making money, or there is other reasons to quit (possibly just reflecting poor on your business, giving you bad exposure).
So the example I want to give is the famous Million Pixel site from last year. It was the biggest thing when some young lad in college made a site to sell a million pixels on his site for $1 each to anyone who wanted online advertising. And he said he would keep the site up for 5 years. So for $100 it was pretty good advertising for 5 years (100 pixels was minimum buy).
Well it sold like wildfire, I believe he sold out in about 5 months.
And everyone and their dog jumped on the bandwagon and set up their own pixel site. Search the net now and you can find hundreds of pixel sites. Most of these have very poor sales (some did very good at first).
So you might be led to believe that pixel sites are dead. No money in that.
Well, I am not sure, but I am not ready to cover the coffin with dirt just yet.
The problem is that the first site was a fad, the latest trend. It had great exposure and great press. So it sold well. Some copycats rode that wave of media coverage and sold not bad. But then people just sat there and expected their site to sell itself. Well if you know anything about marketing on the internet, you know that if you do not market your website, then you will not get any traffic.
So I believe that a pixel site, with proper marketing could do well. First of all, need a niche – say a local city – the Winnipeg Pixel Site. Now you need to make sure that people are getting value. Yes they will have their link to a site that hopefully will have good PR, and many links coming in to it (anyone who purchase should link to the site), so the buyers should get some value from that.
But what else can we do. Well, we could put all buyers in a directory with a description of their product, they will get exposure for their business from this. We could have them accept that they will get 1 email advertisement per week highlighting 5 businesses, that way all the businesses get exposure to the other businesses.
By sending out local press releases the businesses will get coverage. Possibly add a free mini-game to the site to bring traffic to the site. Give everyone a free business or marketing guide to the internet when they purchase. Let them all access to a membership site where they can network with other businesses.
There, in just a few minutes I thought up a number of ways to add value and build traffic to the site, and keep that traffic coming back.
Not that I am promoting pixel sites in particular, but any fad or trend can be re-done, re-packaged, re-marketed to make it better, and to put dollars in your pocket.
The other BIG reason is that trends are only stale to the people that have heard about them. The wonderful thing about the internet is it is still growing at a phenomenal rate. Every day new people who have never heard of a pixel site (or any other trend) is getting online. Those old fads are brand new to these people.
So don’t jump too quick off the band-wagon. Trust the numbers and believe there is more opportunity than many people think.
Speaking of new trends and fads – check out Joel Comm’s new site –http://www.500words.com/
