Marketing Online for a Cause- HelpAnimalCruelty.com
April 5, 2007 by Pablo Palatnik
I’ve always wanted to do something to help prevent animal cruelty. It’s a personal battle I have with myself to try and do something about it, and so far the only thing I could really do with the time available to me is donate money to organizations that are already fighting this cause.
I’m not going to get into details about my personal feelings about what we can do to help prevent cruelty to animals in this post, but I will share the mind process I had when the idea was sparked to make a website about it.
How can I help?
-I can create a website in literally an hour or less and I know how to market my website online. Those two combinations can lead me to my personal goal of raising awareness, now I can really make a difference.
Step 1- Register domain name (helpanimalcruelty.com)
Step 2- Create web design in FrontPage (took me about one hour at most while randomly adding stuff until present day)
How to raise awareness?
Step 3- Drive Traffic (Most important part of the step).
When we setup our marketing campaign for either a product or service, we’re looking to deliver highly qualified traffic to convert on whatever we are selling or promoting. This campaign is unique in its own way that EVERYONE is considered qualified traffic because EVERYONE can make a difference so I would like to target people who are already supporting the cause, but it would probably be wise to attract those who don’t (hence raise awareness). BTW- my conversion would be for people to read and watch the video as well as donate money to PETA.
After I was done with the website I was really anxious to get it out to the public. I wanted to take action immediately and deliver traffic as soon as possible and see what results I can get using analytics (CrazyEgg) where I can see if people are clicking the donate button or any of the links I wanted them to. (Note: I can’t track conversions on donations since I’m driving traffic to the PETA donation site)
Plan of Action:
PPC Campaign
Social Book Marking
Social Media
Blogging
Any PPC campaign, within minutes of setting it up, can deliver traffic instantly — especially if you’re bidding on high volume searched words. We all know that.
-The Social Bookmarks such as Digg, Reddit, Netscape, etc…Still amazes me at the rapid rate they can also deliver traffic. I submitted the video to Digg but linked it to my homepage where the video actually is. Although it almost got no diggs (I don’t know why!!) it still drove traffic back to my website. Submitting an article a day or every so often will guarantee traffic back to my site to keep traffic coming back.
-On Myspace, I literally made a profile in a matter of minutes and was ready to request people. Again, everyone is qualified to visit this website, BUT I wanted to start my campaign by targeting groups on Myspace (Animal Rights, Kentucky Fried Cruelty, etc..) I had a few people write me and a few visits from an hour or less of requesting friends.
-I’m sure you’ve heard this one before, “leaving comments on other blogs will drive traffic back to youâ€, that sounds like a lot of work, but not only can it be a good link builder, but it works! If you still haven’t done this yet (I was a bit hesitant at first because I didn’t see much worthiness) you have to try it. You can’t expect to drive traffic from leaving a comment on someone’s blog but target high-traffic, high-quality blogs, leave comments, and trust me — the traffic will come.
So, in a matter of less than 24 hours I built a website, drove traffic, and began accomplishing my goal. It’s only the beginning of what was a campaign of less than 24 hours; imagine what a few months can do repeating the same steps daily or weekly!
