The evolving design of our tech stack…
Last week, as we continue on our ongoing series on the blog marketing tech stack, we talked about the overall SYSTEM that we’re building. FUNCTION determines FORM… and that determines the various tools that we have to tack onto our tech stack. You can refer back to issue #241 of The Edge.
I went and revised our evolving diagram to take this into account and here’s what I’ve come up with so far…
Now that we’ve made these changes, you can see that everything we’ve done so far pretty much has to do with 3 parts of our business:
- Subscription
- Conversion
- Delivery
That leaves a lot of missing parts. So, let’s continue adding to our stack. Let’s go over to the beginning part of our system: AWARENESS.
At this stage, we’re primarily talking about all the social networks and paid advertising networks. Any complete marketing system is going to make use of paid ads so that we can take control of our traffic destiny and not leave it to lady luck with SEO. Here’s the main players:
- Google Adwords
- Youtube
- Bing
Obviously, we’ve included a number of social networks there. With any of them, you can do the usual organic (free) traffic generation by sharing, interacting, etc. However, if you really want to take control over the situation, you’d want to explore the paid side of them. Facebook Advertising can be quite powerful as a traffic generator. Twitter Ads has the power to put your tweeted message in front of anybody you please (whether they follow you or not). Same with the rest of them.
Then, you have search engines. If you use Google Adwords, that gives you access to not only search ads, but the whole banner ad network, Youtube ads, and more. And while Google tends to be the de facto right now, let’s not forget Bing. There’s also the whole Yahoo/Bing search partnership which means that when you set up an ad with Bing, you can appear not only on Bing, but Yahoo… even DuckDuckGo.
All of these are traffic sources – traffic TOOLS – that would be integrated into our overall strategy. How to actually use all these traffic sources is beyond the scope of this issue, but the point is, we’re looking here at tools that come in when it comes to reaching new people and making them AWARE that we exist.
In terms of tools to help you get out there, you can use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer. And let’s not forget podcasting… which continues to be an excellent way to reach new people. So there, we’d have iTunes, Stitcher and Google Music. The list could go on, too.
So, here’s where our tech stack is now:
Now, do you have to actually USE all these things? Do we have to be like Pat Flynn who says you have to “be everywhere”? Hell no!
Look, what we’re creating in this series is the “perfect” stack. Surely, if you were running the perfect blog-based online business, you would have well developed presences in ALL of these places. But, for us normal people, that’s just not realistic. It is far too time consuming.
So, you simply do what you can. There are a lot of ways to reach new people and make them aware of you. There are a lot of places where you can distribute your content. You simply pick the ones that you feel you can do… and do it. As your capacity allows, you can add a new one to the stack.
In the next issue, we’ll be talking about tools for use in engagement. At this point, they’ve landed on our page. It’s time to “hook” ’em. 🙂
– David
Here’s how I help people every day…
Make everything about managing your site simpler… by having me on your team to help make sure everything goes smoothly. By providing the very best tools, the best hosting and maintaining everything for you… I’ll take care of the mechanics so you can just focus on growth.
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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.
