OK, Now That I’ve Built It, Why Don’t They Come?

This article was published in the Washington Times on 10/18/99.

Let’s face it: the World Wide Web, for all the glorified opportunities it presents, is still no “Field of Dreams.” The mere fact that you put up a web site might seem a big deal to you, but in reality, you probably haven’t made as much as a ripple in this vast Cybersea.

At hand is the issue that many businesses build web sites because they know they need or want to have an Internet presence, but they have given little thought to it beyond that. Think of it as having a terrific-looking mass mailing piece that never gets mailed - if no one sees it, what good does it do you?

Since the Internet is so vast, as a web site publisher, you really need to think about the marketing of your web site from the time of its creation: Who exactly are you targeting? How are prospective clients going to find out about your web site? What do you have to offer visitors once they get there? Have they a reason to return to your site in the future? Do you collect information from them so that you can communicate with them on an ongoing basis?

It is conservatively estimated that there are now over 320 million web pages. That’s a lot of clutter and competition for your prospect’s eyeballs. In order to count on generating a serious flow of traffic to your site - particularly if you are trying to conduct commerce online - you had better have a strong plan of action in order to promote your web site. That’s where Internet marketing comes into play.

What is Internet marketing? Quite simply, it’s anything you do to maximize your web site traffic and visibility. Yes, Internet marketing includes such things as registering your web site with the major search engines, but that’s not even the half of it.

Internet marketing is also about creating a web site with your audience’s preferences and behaviors in mind, not yours. It’s about the psychology of your visitors, their expectations, how visiting your web site can help them by either making their lives easier, more convenient, or providing them with information they couldn’t otherwise readily obtain. It can be about building a sense of community with others in your industry or about providing them with a way to receive quick and easy updates to your price or new product lists. These site enhancements are only limited by your imagination, but one thing is for sure: once you have incorporated them onto your site, you’ll want to promote the hell out of it if you want results from your web investment.

These days, we’re seeing more and more evidence of using traditional media to promote web sites - television, radio and print ads, direct mail pieces and billboards, to name a few. Super Bowl ‘99 was the most dramatic example of this kind of marketing to date. If you have the advertising dollars to promote your web site this way, most certainly do! Also, start URL-dropping. Use your web address on your business cards, letterhead, envelopes, brochures, corporate vehicles, telephone book ads?anyplace where your company name may be. However, do not forget the online world as well.

As we mentioned earlier, though search engines are one part of the Internet marketing puzzle, it’s a passive and incomplete approach to the marketing of your site. By relying solely on search engines, you’re basically saying, “Let’s just sit back and wait for someone to come looking for what we have to offer.” Then, if you’re lucky (and your webmaster skilled), the search engine might actually pull up your web site name within the first 200 listings (generally considered the threshold of a searcher’s interest). Going back to that figure of 320 million web pages, it has been said that even the best search engines can only reach about 40% of those pages. Lesson One: don’t think that by registering your site with search engines, you are done marketing your site.

A more active approach to online web marketing is thinking, “How can we use the Web to reach our target markets and let them know we’re out here?” Ask yourself what is it that your site does best. What can you promote about your site that would interest someone who reads about it elsewhere? Can you use other web sites to cross promote your own?

These methods fall into the active Internet marketing category, and include such techniques as site linking, affiliate programs, recommendation campaigns, content contribution, “e-dialogue,” banner advertising, site sponsorships, permission-granted emailing, online public relations, e-mail signature files, and more. We’ll cover these more thoroughly in some of our next columns.

Finally, as a closing thought, you might find that you are getting a lot of site visitors, but little interest in what you have to say. You’ll know this if your web site statistics show a heavy volume of traffic, but you are receiving few inquiries or orders. This might be because even if you do have visitors, they might not be the crowd you thought you invited. This reinforces one thing you must always be doing to optimize ALL of your web marketing efforts: analyze, evaluate, refine and re-work. Fortunately, this electronic medium makes that relatively easy.

 back to top