So I never thought I’d say this: Vaping is in desperate need of more competent writers.

Because vaping is a relatively new industry there seems to be a huge delta between the amount of questions being asked and the answers being provided. A client has pushed me deep into the industry and as I dig further into the marketing elements of vaping I realize that vaping is in the same boat that internet poker was in the early 2000’s.

We have a product that:

• Generally is seen as negative by the majority of the populace
• Has no major paid ad networks to advertise with because of self imposed exclusions (I’m looking at you Google and Facebook)
• Is undergoing constant shifts in policy and product architecture, there is no “Apple of vaping” yet
• Is age gated and under increasing regulations

So where does that leave a digital marketer? You have a majority of your bread-and-butter networks cut off from you and anything you do could be invalidated or erased at a moments notice. Well, the answer that poker companies came to is that same that I have: start writing and don’t stop. Hyperbole aside, there are some paid alternatives but most of them involve a portal that separates the sale of the product from the content of the page your customers are landing on. A way vaping companies are getting around paid network restrictions is by pushing ads to dedicated content sites and either advertising on those sites or having those sites link to their primary eCommerce site. This is when good ad copy matters the most because you are convincing a potentially brand new customer to go to yet another site to complete a task (sign up for a newsletter/purchase a product.)

Working closely with my client we devised a plan to generate both noteworthy and informative articles on vaping as well as socially instigatory click-bate-a-la-Buzzfeed articles to release to the major networks. We settled on WordPress as our CMS and used Amazon Web Services for hosting. I wouldn’t suggest this for people without a technical skill set as it’s a bit of overkill. Hosting services like HostGator are more than sufficient at providing you the features you need to run a website like this and offer the ability to scale up with increasing traffic. AWS worked best for us because the client wanted full control of his server, content and scalability. Also, to start, AWS is free.

For design, we settled on an out of the box theme- Bimber (for those interested.) Why reinvent the wheel?

Initially, myself and my client will be providing all of the content for the site but this will expand into dedicated copywriters and guest posts as the site gains traction. We’re aiming for a good mix of sensational and informative but this is liable to change as we track results.

And here are the fruits of our Labour:

VapeCasa.io is born and she’s a beauty.

So how is this going to impact my client’s business and what are the goals for the platform? Our initial thoughts were as follows:

• Provides a platform to communicate with the vaping industry as a whole; a way to see what works and catches the eyes of potential customers.
• An indirect way to advertise while controlling the messaging, reach and conversion tracking. This is huge because so many of vaping’s current advertising channels rely on a CPM model and traditional billboard style display advertising.
• A relatively fast way to build a community parallel to the client’s eCommerce business and to keep a pulse on the industry.
• Massive SEO implications for do-follow links within particular articles and pages.
• An indirect way to gather qualified email addresses in a non-spammy way.

The site has only just officially launched and we’ve seen the flickerings of qualified traffic already. The next big steps are to get a social sharing plugin that encourages and rewards interaction to grow these numbers quickly.

She’s alive! And to think, only half of those visits are us frantically checking the site for errors…

I hope this was a good snapshot of how getting back to the basics can sometimes be the best approach when building long-term value for a client. We live in a world where machine learning and automation are king but the undercurrent of writing and ad copy still drives much of what eventually causes people to interact and purchase products and how Google decides who lives and who dies on the SERPS.