Why do you spend money on marketing? It’s to get visitors to your site, right?
If you think about it, getting visitors to your website is great, but what you are really doing is spending money to make more of it. From a business standpoint, it doesn’t make sense to spend money on marketing unless it helps you generate more revenue.
What are the best places to spend your marketing dollars? Maybe Google AdWords, SEO, or social media? Those are all great channels worth leveraging, but they are crowded.
So, where should you be spending your dollars? It’s on unconventional tactics because the ROI from them is typically higher.
Here are 7 unconventional marketing tactics that will help you make more money:
Write guest posts
You already know about guest-posting, but are you actually leveraging it? It works extremely well, and it isn’t competitive. It’s working so well for me that I am guest-posting roughly five times a week.
That’s right, not only am I posting on Quick Sprout three times a week, but I am guest-posting five times a week as well.
Why should you guest-post? No, not for SEO purposes. Do it to drive more business to yourself.
As long as you can write good content, it will be extremely easy for you to get your content published on authoritative sites. It doesn’t matter if you have guest-posted before or not. Sites like Forbes, Huffington Post and Entrepreneur Magazine are all looking for more high quality content because it helps them boost their traffic, which increases their ad revenue.
The way you can generate revenue through guest-posting is by writing on topics related to your business and naturally mentioning your company within your author bio and, possibly, within the post.
A good example of this strategy in use is Buffer. They guest-post multiple times a week, and it drives signups for their service.
If you are wondering how effective guest-posting is, I can tell you that each guest post I publish is worth roughly $4,139 in revenue. The revenue is collected in the form of leads and new customers. Of that $4,139, roughly $385 is generated in the first thirty days. The rest is collected over a two-year period.
For me, the key to successful guest-blogging is writing for authoritative sites as they tend to rank well on search engines. Beyond that, I blog on topics that are broad enough to capture a decent amount of search traffic yet still relevant to my business so that they can help generate revenue.
Throw lavish parties
Have you ever been to a party that is so much fun that you still remember how great it was? Or, better yet, you still discuss it with your friends?
We all have been to parties like that, but I bet you haven’t been to a party that had mermaids…
fire breathers…
people walking on water…
and fireworks.
An entrepreneur by the name of Dan Fleyshman is well-known for throwing parties like the one depicted above. He’ll spend anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 on a party every three months and invite his friends and business colleagues to attend.
It may sound crazy to spend that much money on a party that only lasts five hours, but it helps him create a lot of goodwill. People want to do business with him, and the revenue that he generates indirectly from each event more than pays for the cost of the event.
It may sound ridiculous to you to throw an extravagant party, but if you truly go over the top, people will talk about it and want to attend it. This will cause people to try to associate themselves with your brand and your company, which will lead to more revenue.
Personal branding
Have you noticed that I spend a lot of time building up my personal brand? I monitor how many people search for my name each month through Google Trends.
Every month, I try to get more and more people to search for my name, which isn’t an easy thing to do.
Can you guess why I do this?
No, it’s not because I want to be famous. And I don’t do it to boost my ego either. I do it because my personal brand helps drive millions of dollars in revenue each year.
How so?
Well, chances are you first found out about me on Twitter, Facebook, or my blog. From there, you learned a bit more about me and my companies, and eventually, you tried out my products, which helped me generate revenue.
If you want to build a personal brand that helps generate income for your business, you need to focus on helping others. Consistently, give people advice and feedback for free. Indirectly, this will cause your business to grow.
You can do this through blogs, emails, conferences, or networking events.
Show off
This strategy won’t work well for everyone, but it can work for certain types of people and businesses.
One person who has a habit of showing off is Timothy Sykes. From pictures of his vacations…
to his fancy watches…
and his sports cars,
Tim continually tries to show how wealthy he is and how great his lifestyle is. He even has Facebook status updates that tell you how much income he makes or how much he spends on taxes.
His online persona makes him seem like an obnoxious guy who thinks money is all that matters in this world. But if you get to know the real Tim Sykes, you will see that he is not like that at all. He is a family man, who spends time taking care of his parents, who loves helping people in need and who even donates a lot of his income to charitable causes. He just never shares that information with the world.
He only has this online persona because it helps him generate new students for his Trading Challenge program, which brings him millions of dollars.
As you can see from the image above, one person is already in communication with Tim’s employee Ryan and is on his way of becoming a paid student.
If you are in the business of helping other people succeed or in consulting, showing off may help you generate leads and income. You just have to be careful with this strategy as it can also backfire.
Create software…and give it away for free
That’s right, you should spend thousands of dollars on software and give it away for free. It might not sound reasonable, but it works extremely well.
Just look at Quick Sprout. Its homepage features a tool that helps you grow your traffic. In total, I’ve spent over $100,000 on that tool, but the traffic increase this tool helped generate resulted in more income than it cost me to build it.
Within the first four days of me launching the tool, 17,747 people ran 22,562 URLs through it. Since then, its popularity has been growing steadily.
The increase in traffic has lead to additional revenue as more people signed up for my premium membership package because of it.
In addition to that, I tested charging for additional features in the tool, and the test was very positive: you were willing to pay for additional analysis.
In the end, I decided not to charge for the features as my goal is not to use Quick Sprout for revenue – it is to help you out. But if I wanted to make money from Quick Sprout, it wouldn’t be hard for me to generate a few hundred grand a month in income.
Invoke curiosity through design
Have you noticed that many people these days are creating complex websites that go into vast detail about their products and services? I’ve been guilty of this myself with my personal site.
As you can see, my design goes into great depths about the services I offer. For fun, I decided to invoke curiosity by creating a version that doesn’t go into much depth.
Can you guess what the difference in the conversion rate was? The design that invoked curiosity resulted in 318% more leads. And the best part is the lead quality didn’t change.
Not only that, but the new version also drives 129% more direct traffic, meaning more people are now visiting the site.
If you want to grow your traffic and increase your conversion rate, try doing something unconventional with your design. Doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing in your space is a great way to generate some buzz, traffic, and revenue.
Work for free
The best thing I did for my career was to help out A-list web celebrities for free. When I did this, I didn’t have a well-known brand, and no one cared about who I was.
My strategy was simple. I emailed the well-known entrepreneurs and gave them free advice. In exchange, I asked them to tell their friends about me and refer business.
Not only did my revenue go up, but my reputation as a good online marketer improved as well.
If you are wondering how you can leverage this strategy for your business, you can just copy the steps I took.
For fun, I decided to add up all the income this tactic helped me generate. Can you guess how much revenue it brought? From the first deal to the last one, it helped generate $2,850,750. That’s not too shabby for sending out 46 emails.
Conclusion
If you are looking to grow your business, start thinking outside the box. The popular marketing tactics that you already know, such as Google AdWords, are great, but they aren’t always profitable. For this reason, you need to get used to trying new tactics that others haven’t used yet.
Test out some of the methods above. Some may work for your business, while others may not. You will just have to test and adapt different tactics to the needs of your business.
What are some other unconventional marketing tactics that work?