case study: Online Marketing

CHALLENGE: Secure pervasive online marketing vehicles for Crisp online magazine.

IMPLEMENTATION: Thanks to our research and online publishing experience dating way back to 1993's Trincoll Journal, we knew that 80 percent of Crisp's traffic would come from 20 percent of its links, so we decided to focus first on securing a few monumental marketing alliances, then on funneling traffic from the major search engines, and only then would we concentrate on amassing general Web links.

RESULTS: Strong Bat secured and reaped the benefits from the full gamut of online marketing vehicles for Crisp online magazine. We pitched Crisp to Packard Bell, the world's largest personal-computer maker, as an asset to its computer users, a pro-social youth magazine that would serve as an refreshing alternative to the many stamp-out sites who were paying handsomely to be bundled with Packard Bell computers through Planet Oasis. They agreed, and proceeded to bundle Crisp with its computers for seven months, translating into links in nearly two million computers. Another effective online marketing affiliate was Web Broadcasting Systems (WBS), consistently cited as one of the top 100 sites for traffic. Based on Crisp's content and audience, WBS chose to create and host Crisp's chat room and promote both Crisp and our chat room on its site. We then successfully harnessed traffic being generated by search engines. After extensive search-engine research, we created and submitted multiple bookmarkable pages to over 100 engines, and then troubleshot the idiosyncracies of the most popular engines - an ongoing process - until Crisp gloated among the tops of their lists, not only for searches of "Crisp" but also for such keywords as "art," "activism," "women's interests," "fiction," "poetry," and "love." Finally, we conducted productive - not just promotional - posts to applicable newsgroups, and secured links from award sites, major genre directories and over 500 general Web links.