opponentWhen you’re just beginning your career as a new internet marketer, one extremely important term you might not have heard of is pull marketing.

In this post I’ll give you an overview of what, exactly, pull marketing is, and how you can use it to get more people to your website.

Pull Marketing Definition

Pull marketing is a term used to refer to a site’s ability to let users find them.

It’s best understood when contrasted with push marketing. In push marketing, websites and companies are putting themselves directly in front of the user. Paid advertising for example, or a company’s social media posts.

Pull marketing is the opposite. Users search for something and find themselves on a company’s website. The biggest example is organic search rankings, but gaining natural links from other bloggers or unprompted social media shares are also examples of pull marketing.

Why Pull Marketing Works

In general, traffic generated from pull marketing techniques is more valuable than that originating from push techniques.

The key difference is user intent.

If a user searches for something and finds what he is looking for, he is naturally going to be more attentive and more receptive than if that same item were forced in front of him.

Think of the following two scenarios:

  1. I look at a picture of a marathon runner, and an ad for Nike shoes comes up.
  2. I Google “best running shoes” and the first result is Nike.

In which of these scenarios am I more interested in the product? Obviously the latter.

What Internet Marketers Can Do

This means that there is tremendous opportunity to leverage long tail keywords within a pull marketing strategy.

This opportunity is the essence of affiliate marketing, since successful affiliates are those that can provide the user what he wants when he is looking for it, without having to force the product in front of them.

To learn more, I recommend this free marketing course from Wealthy Affiliate, which will teach you the basics of how to use long tail, pull marketing techniques to drive traffic to your blog or website.