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Play This is all about bettering yourself through knowledge, EFM has now partnered to write a series of marketing article.
Starting from Scratch
A basic and rather important rule that comes in handy when starting to brand yourself, a new company or the like is to know your market. That being said, you must write or market yourself to your audience.
Not Ted's Bacon Fries
Example: Ted’s Bacon Fries
All though one of the more popular of Internet memes at the current time, Ted will have to market his bacon fries outside of the meme market.
A Website like Reddit or Geekologie will often take hold of new creative products like Ted’s Bacon Fries, which will also help boost rankings on his website selling the item. The readers will more than likely not actually buy the product though. Sure Baconaise was tested on the Daily Show, but that resulted in a review stating it was essentially vomit.
A product as unique as bacon fries would better be sold on sites who truly enjoy bacon.
Jokes aside, you must fully support your audience, interact with them and give them what they want. This is a consumers market after all and forming a trusted brand takes years, unless you are TheOatmeal, who is headed up by a Internet marketing guru anyways.
Start off small
You don’t need to immediately join Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and every other social networking site at the start as you will find yourself being stretched thin. Before marketing yourself to Web 2.0 sites on a vast span, try to create a time table that you can implement to devoted updates and customer responses (a customer doesn’t have to be someone who purchases something, it can be a reader, contributor or even friends and family).
Pick one site to start with and expand as needed, although it couldn’t hurt to reserve your product/company name for later use.
Ignore the allure of Web 2.0
Start with a simple product Website and ensure it’s complete before you market it. One of the easiest site creators, WordPress, can be used by anyone and leaves a lot of creative flexibility. Do not use terrible publishers like FrontPage, they will never bring in the right crowed. Using are tutorials [Creating a cheap website, Part two, not getting fined for endorsed articles, how to write an article that doesn't suck] will help you set up the site and EFM will even personally assist you if you e-mail them.
Once you have successfully built a website, test it out on friends and family. Try to get the brutally honest ones because the more you can fix from the start the better, as large changes after the wheels are going full speed will cause a split audience (Facebook’s current privacy concerns are a great example of this).
