Hiking Along the Marketing Trail
Marketing News, Website Development, Small Business, Market Research, Sports Marketing May 1st, 2007WHEW – building an on online affiliate store is a lot of work – that is if you go about it the right way. The key is research followed by more research and so on but at some point, the rubber needs to hit the road - or in our case - the boots need to hit the trail.
In the building of Sandboxspots.com, we’ve been doing our due diligence on keyword research and studying the terms and phrases that people are actually
searching for concerning sporting goods and sports apparel.
We’ve been using some pretty sophisticated keyword research tools that are beyond the scope of this post to expound on. In future posts we’ll be discussing what some of these metrics are that are driving our strategy.
The important note here is that we’re going where the market is vs. creating a business model and then trying to bring the market to us. We don’t have that type of advertising budget! Once the site is set up, we’ll collect opt-in data that we’ll eventually use to further satiate the appetite of our hungry, athletic customers. This is where our real marketing muscle will come into play.
For now, we’ve established a few themes that will be set up as directories on the new site and then further subdivided into appropriate categories. For example, one of our themes will be related to the hiking niche.
According to the Keyword Selector Tool at Overture, “hiking” specifically, is a keyword term that was searched for 21715 times last month alone. The rule of thumb is to triple that number of queries to account for the exact same keyword searches conducted on other search engines including Google and MSN.
We’re actually using software that gives us far more accurate data than this simple rule of thumb approach but nonetheless, the Overture approach provides us with a quick snap shot of a given niche and whether the niche warrants further investigative research.
We’re continuing to build out the themes that we’ll be getting started with at sandboxsports.com but we’ve already started the creation of content for sports that will be featured for certain. These will include hiking, golf, scuba diving, skiing, fishing as well as certain fitness themes such as yoga and massage.
We are also setting up our affiliate/merchant agreements with world class distributors through Commission Junction (and direct) and we will of course match our content to products that include powerhouse brand names such as Adidas, Oakley and North Face to name a few.
So these are some of the broad strokes of what we’ve been up to and the marketing trail we’re following. There are lots and lots of details to sort through and the possibilities are amazing. Stick with us, and we’ll keep you posted on the evolution of our little affiliate store that could.
The affiliate store system that we’ve posted about before is making the execution of these logistics manageable and achievable. There may still be some systems available so it’s worth opting in and vetting their sales letter if you haven’t already.
Happy marketing! 
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