Traffic: Blog Gimmicks

As the internet world becomes more and more saturated with blogs, blogs are having to do more and more to differentiate themselves from their competition. Differentiation comes in a variety of different forms such as content quality, personality, quirks, gimmicks, etc. Today, I'll talk about the marketing tactic of gimmicks.

In the marketing world, a gimmick is a unique or quirky special feature that makes something "stand out" from its contemporaries. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimmick) These features could be anything from a money blog written by a 13 year old to a talking gecko spokesperson for an insurance company. When working with gimmicks, the more extreme, quirky, and memorable, the better it is.

And so you're probably wondering, why don't everyone use gimmicks with their work (and to an extent just about everyone uses a gimmick for their business, some just aren't as extreme as others)? But anyways, typically, when someone uses the gimmick tactic, they're promoting a nonserious product or service. For example, while you may see a car dealership advertising with a dancing man in a whale costume, you're not going to see a corporate lawfirm advertising with the same strategy. When considering to use gimmicks as a marketing strategy, you have keep in mind who your target demographic is. If your demographic are older, more serious people and you're selling an expensive luxury product, gimmicks probably aren't you're looking for.

And so, with this blog that you see here, I'm going to be experimenting with a variety of gimmicks and see how they work out for me (the main theme of the site, "An arduous experiment to see if you can actually succeed in making money online" is of course a gimmick). But I'll see if I can dive into a deeper level, drawing a clearer picture of what this site is and how it's different from the competition.