Wade, I just stumbled across your site from the Christian webmasters
site…looks good. I have some marketing questions, and I just don’t know
where to turn. I have a 6 month old business that a friend and I put together
AltaregoBrand.com. I am having a terrible time figuring out how to get traffic
to it - I get 1-3 uniqes per day. I have added to a few directories, and we
have an affiliate system put together that has banners on about 10 myspace
pages…don’t know if we are going about this right…I have tried to read up,
I am very technical, wondered if you could offer any advice…Thanks in
advance.

Steve,

Thanks for the question, there are a few things that I might recommend in terms of getting traffic to your page. I’d start with some issues with your page first to make sure that you get all you can from the traffic you receive - so we’ll handle that first:

1. “Hero images” - on your “Home Page” you have a nice looking image - but it has little(that I can tell) to do with your products. Take a look at sites like C28 and JesusBranded and you’ll see that they show their designs, on people or with the design really visible. JesusBranded does this really well.
2. Product images - you need to pump up the image size and detail to help your shopper make their decision. Make sure you can zoom in and really see some detail.

You might want to think of upgrading your cart ASAP to get some better merchandising possibilities…On to traffic.

What are you doing to find affiliates ? Are you actively seeking them out? How much time a week do you spend tracking down sites that appeal to your target demographic? (thinking youth and young adult evangelicals) ?

Making an affiliate program go takes some real effort, especially when you are just getting started as a brand and don’t have a big name to trade on or a ton of budget. There’s a lot of “sweat equity” involved.

Here are a few of initial suggestions for grass roots marketing effort:

1. Go after blogger/reviewers - you search for terms like “t shirt blog” and see what you find. Send them a shirt and a note that lets them know about your company and what you believe and what makes you special.
2. See if you can dig yourself in at some youth/young adult centered social networks- you might consider doing some giveaway promotions through them and making them an aggressive revenue share offer.
3. If you do take the social network approach, set up an account and participate actively as well
4. If you have some budget, and a means of tracking the results (Google Analytics if nothing else) do some PPC buys in MSN, Yahoo and Google with appropriate keywords. Set some spending limits to make sure you don’t dig yourself into too much of a hole.
5. Use VIDEO - if your products are cool and you get video of say - extreme athletes with “cool factor” wearing them as they do their stuff - put them on your site and post them in the video networks like YouTube, GodTube, etc. Encourage your customers to submit their own video - Everyone under the age of 30 seems to have at least a camera phone now. Encourage participation with giveaways.
6. Watch out for using affiliate links in MySpace - it is actually against their T’c and C’s and can get all of your ads blocked if MySpace catches on.

I am really hesitant to spend or to recommend spending much on PPC until I know that my site’s results will justify it.

Anyone else have some ideas for Steve? Feel free to post comments here. As a community of Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I think we should do what we can to help each other be successful in putting Gospel promoting products out there.

In the meantime, here’s some LOVE from ChristianAffiliateMarketers.com my Brother

God Bless!