Alternate Distribution

Opportunities includes affiliate marketing and procurement intermediaries, as well as submission to social venues and comparison engines. Although you may make significant headway building your own user base due to providing value-added tools or other content to your lifestyle segment, leveraging existing user base holds a lot of potential. Map out the touch points of your lifestyle group first. Are they using comparison engines? Are they frequenting content sites that are well off your radar?

Depending on your content strategy, there could be potential syndication of content that you’re producing or utilities that you’re developing. This can perpetuate your brand message, drive house ads through to you, and even help you work together with partner companies to create some kind of co-branded applications. Syndication is a great way to get things to market and get distribution for your content and the thought leadership that you’ve created.

Affiliate advertising is another way to go. It’s primarily for product-related companies on the consumer level, but you get some brand exposure when you’re getting distribution through their efforts (in exchange for sharing a piece on the CPA level.) You do need to take steps to maintain your brand. This means watching to make sure that affiliates follow your creative guidelines and style guides. You don’t need to go to an affiliate network, either. You might be able to develop relationships directly with a couple of other sites and tie them into your brand, give them a great value for working with you. There are other alternate approaches you might consider as well, based on your brand and what makes sense given the community it serves.