Daily Marketing Ace

I’ve been thinking about how to take Daily Marketing Ace to the next level in terms of sustainable traffic, and I’ve decided that it would be great fun to make a case study out of it.

Thus far in this project, I have been mostly focused on improving the base of tip contributors (content), building the technology foundation (medium) and, figuring out how to make money with it (sales process). Content, medium, and sales process; three critical pieces of the information marketing model — and definitely where the initial focus of this project needed to be.  But you can’t focus on content, medium, and sales process for ever.  At some point, traffic needs to come in to the picture.

We’ve got decent traffic to Daily Marketing Ace, considering that the project is still very young, but certainly nothing near the kind of traffic we need to truly make this project a  profitable success. So now that the project has passed the concept, and working prototype phases, I think it is time to look for ways to greatly increase the traffic to Daily Marketing Ace.  I’m really thinking of this next phase as the beta launch of Daily Marketing Ace.  Honestly, I expected to be out of beta and into full launch with this project by now, but if I take a really honest look at where it is versus the long-term vision of where it will go, the most accurate description of the current project phase is “beta.”

The purpose of this phase will be to take Daily Marketing Ace to a level where it is self-sustaining.  In other words, the project will move out of the beta phase and into the launch phase when it reaches the point where it could continue with very little time, effort, and resources and still be a viable and profitable project.  It’s all about reaching a critical mass.  I will define that critical mass specifically in future blog posts, but for now, think of ‘critical mass’ as the point at which Daily Marketing Ace can be run on near autopilot — and traffic is a key ingredient.  Traffic is not the only ingredient, but certainly one of the highest priorities.

Since this phase of the project is just getting started, I thought it might be fun to share the complete process with my subscribers and blog readers — starting with a case study in developing a traffic strategy.  During the case study, I’ll share with you the high points of the process I go through to create a plan to build traffic to Daily Marketing Ace.

I like the idea of doing this as a case study for several reasons:

1. By documenting the process I can create helpful content for the Daily Marketing Ace blog.
2. By focusing on a specific topic over a series of posts, I hope to engage other bloggers and invite them to participate in the ‘conversation’ about developing a traffic strategy.
3. Developing my strategy publicly will help me to refine it and resist the temptation to skip steps
4. I’m hoping that I’ll get feedback and suggestions from readers along the way to help me improve my strategy.

In my next post, I’ll share the objectives for the project and begin to dig in to some possible tactical solutions.  I’ll show you what I hope to accomplish and some of the traffic generation techniques that are under consideration.

All of the posts will be filed under the “Marketing Ace Case Study” category.