Marketing Plans for 2009

Here's what I'm thinking about in terms of strategy...

Fine tune the SEO strategy or keep throwing pages and links at it? Are there overlooked phrases? Do we have phrases that never convert that we should rethink? The answer of course is yes. But, if we really devoted two man months to this project, could we improve our performance enough to make it worthwhile? Or, should I go with my traditional approach of just throwing my pages and links at the problem?

How to reduce my credit card processing fees? I have a whole blog on my questions about merchant accounts.

Improved email marketing. Our best asset might be our lists of people who have asked for my info and our lists of happy satisfied customers. We've finally built the tools to explore and market to these lists. I'm expecting this to be the single largest engine of growth for 2009. To really take advantage of it, I'll need more products and services to market.

Mastery of advertising revenue. I'm planning to get more effective at making money from advertising. This year, we experimented with CPM advertising but not with much success. We got some nice $2-$6 rates but only on about 2% of our inventory. I'm hoping next year (thru maybe Tribal Fusion) to get $2 on some large amounts (50%) of our inventory of above-the-fold wide skyscraper ads.

Product diversification. I'm thinking that while SpellingCity is a good start, the reality is that 80% plus of the costs are programming and less than 20% is content. So, for just a 40% increase, I could probably get the site recreated for French and Spanish. hmmmmmmmmm. Plus there's the long-awaited VocabularyCity.com