Crazy Marketing Tactics That Worked For You?

[SEO Guy]

SEO guy here.

I came across this one on the marketing Reddit, but some guy said he managed to land clients by threatening them if they didn't contact him.

Crazy part? It worked.

This is what he sent.

Thought I'd start the same discussion here. Anyone done any crazy tactics that actually worked?

 

[Zwielicht]

When I got into affiliate marketing, there was this product to start learning Spanish that I used to promote that was fairly cheap.

I was struggling to promote it to people who wanted to learn Spanish, so I came up with another idea: promote it to people who already speak Spanish.

You see, I grew up speaking English and Spanish, and in my experience, a lot of Spanish speakers had a tendency to get very pedantic. So I found some sites with Spanish speakers and posted something in not-so-great Spanish about how I’m learning the language and how great this book has been.

My goal was to irritate people into buying so that they could tell me how stupid I was for buying it and that’s why my Spanish was so bad, and it worked. I managed to sell about 10 of those ebooks before I stopped advertising that product. I got my first $100 cheque from Clickbank pretty much from that one product alone.

People are more privy to affiliate links these days, so that exact tactic is unlikely to work now, but the idea behind it definitely still does. It’s like getting people to hate-watch your content on YouTube.

 

[roydan]

some guy said he managed to land clients by threatening them if they didn't contact him.

Reviews sellers do that all the time. They say that they were hired by a competitor to flood you with 1 star reviews, unless you want to hire them for 5 star reviews.

A really stupid practice IMO.

 

[Ranking Expert]

Few year ago i blast my site with sick submitter + AMR and my site hit #1 Position for my main keyword that was Hard. stick on #1 3 to 4 month first 2 month i got approx. $1.5k per month with AdSense and sold site for $10k

 

[Skyrocket]

I upped my prices tenfold. It worked.

 

[Miyamoto]

I upped my prices tenfold. It worked.

Ha ha! This is way to go! Exactly what we do!

 

[t2van]

It's not really crazy - and this is one I'm happy to share

I'm a big fan of copying the SAAS model and then adapting that for organic search

I'm taking about targeting competitors in PPC (ads) but flipping it for search some examples here:

When I first brought this up loads of people shot me down saying it was unethical to go after competitor branded search terms in the SERPS no one seemed to like it. But this one thing has helped me grow, find new customers and just broaden my market share.

(it also gets competitors attention, good or bad way you can decide but one offered me 7 figures fro my company last year so you decide)

This is the classic page:

https://www.brandwatch.com/p/hootsuite-alternative

Everyone does it just not organically and I personally feel it's very effective going after customers who feel let down by that brand or company and have an axe to grind, gripe or just so pissed off with the service they want to swap.

So I simply create pages like the above example and go after things like:

company reviews
company alternative
company contact number
company problem with my order

and many more

The traffic might not be 1000s of searches but it's very highly targeted and you are going after someone who wants to shift. Or has a problem.

I simply create a page focused around that issue, share pros of me vs them.

Provide pricing examples to compare products, delivery and so on as well as stressing our values.

I DO NOT go slagging off the competitor and I do not use competitors logos etc. That's the quickest way to get the wrong kind of attention.

Just make it all honest, genuine and transparent information and you can't get in trouble for claiming something that isn't true.



As mentioned everyone does it when it comes to ads, just no one puts the time in when it comes to organic search terms.