20 Mar 06

“I’ve got a great site - now what?”

In Marketing & PR

Lately I have been focussing as much as possible on developing my own sites, rather than doing 'normal' work for clients. The reason for this is basically that I'm well aware of the possibilities the net offers and the fact that if you do a good job with a site it can really work for you, rather than the other way around. One thing I wasn't anywhere near as aware of as I should have been is how it isn't enough to come up with a great site. Not even close.

When I got MotoReview up and running, for instance, I thought that the combination of a nice design and good, regularly updated content would be enough to get a good amount of traffic relatively quickly. After all, if you're interested in a particular subject and come across a decent site about it you'll return, won't you? But there's another bridge you need to cross before you persuade anyone to come back to your site - they have to find it in the first place.

As I see it there are three ways to get visitors to your new site:

Advertising

The most obvious and quite probably most expensive method. Whether you opt for online or offline advertising you can carefully target an exact audience and if you opt for a CPC (cost per click) solution then you can be certain that every penny you spend goes towards a visitor to your site. If they don't click, you don't pay. How viable paid advertising is depends on your budget and your product. If a converted visitor equals the sale of a high value product and you have a good conversion rate then great - spend, spend, spend. But if a 'conversion' is not worth a great deal and the conversion rate doesn't make up for it, then it might be worth reconsidering, especially if you're targeting a competitive market with high advertising costs.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it's generally known, can unsurprisingly make a huge difference to your site's ability to make sales, bring you leads and simply bring in new visitors. This post isn't intended to be a 'howto' on the subject, so I'm not going to go into too much detail. Frankly, though, you don't need to go into too much detail when it comes to SEO these days. In fact here's a fairly definitive guide to how to rank well in the search engines:

1. Get lots of links to your site that include the keywords you're targeting from 'authority sites' in your subject area.
2. Pat yourself on the back and take the afternoon off.

Of course it's rarely going to be that easy - you need content people will want to link to, for a start. But the truth is that these days a site succeeds or fails in the SEs because of its incoming links. You can add meta keywords, create 'search engine friendly URLs' and write content until you're blue in the face but if nobody links to you you'll remain on page 382.

Viral Marketing

Now this has to be a favourite, because it's free. All you need to do is come up with something noteworthy, something that people look at once and want to show all their friends. How many jokes have been emailed to you in the past month? The problem is it often isn't easy to achieve this. Some areas, like entertainment sites, are suited towards viral marketing. For business sites it's likely to be harder.

With MotoReview the biggest area of the site is the news section, which is updated almost daily with new content. Although the content is original it is more often than not based on the same press releases that every other MotoGP site uses, which makes it tricky to come up with a real exclusive. A week or so ago I heard a rumour which would be interesting to most MotoGP fans, even though it was just a rumour. Within a week of posting the news item I received a huge increase in traffic as people posted links on message boards across the net and I've seen an improved number of daily visitors ever since. Sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us are two popular sites which are synonymous with viral marketing and have recently become so popular it's been suggested they could even be used for manipulating stocks.

That's it! (ish)

Although this post really just scratches the surface of internet marketing and I'm sure for many there is nothing new here, hopefully it's been helpful to some of you who may be wondering why 'we built it but they're not coming!'

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02 Mar 06

Site Promotion with DMOZ

In Marketing & PR

For those of you aren’t familiar with it, DMOZ, or the ‘Open Directory Project’, is the largest human edited website directory in existence. As such, a link to your website in the directory could be beneficial for many reasons…

Only the best sites are accepted (in theory)

Unlike your average search engine, sites are only added to DMOZ once they have been approved by an 'editor' - someone who has volunteered to help maintain a given category (or categories). Editors will only approve sites which meet the directory's guidelines which, in a nutshell, are that 'editors should select quality sites and lots of them'. Because of this many net users will look to DMOZ before a standard search engine, which could result in a healthy boost in targeted traffic to your site.

Two (or more) for the price of one

It's not just the odd net user that values the Open Directory - Google like it too. The big G likes it so much that its own 'Google Directory' is an exact copy! In fact, many websites offer variations or exact copies of the directory, as DMOZ.org make their entire database available to download, for free. With search engines giving incoming links a huge amount of importance when they decide who belongs where in their rankings, links from authority sites such as DMOZ and the Google Directory, as well as other DMOZ mirrors, could make a significant difference to your site's search engine rankings.

Where do I sign up?

Submitting your site to the Open Directory is extremely simple, but that doesn't stop a lot of people from getting it wrong. Before submitting your site, read the submission rules carefully to make sure you follow the right procedure. Depending on the category there may be hundreds of other sites in the submission queue and if yours contains a description that reads like marketing spiel or you've picked the wrong category, the editor may just reject the submission.

The other side of the coin

As DMOZ is edited purely by volunteers, there are no guarantees. You can submit the most relevant, well designed, informative site and find that it never gets added. Sometimes it might take over a year for your submission to be accepted. Some people have really thrown their toys out of the pram and accused the Open Directory of being corrupt and even gone to the trouble of starting their own sites on the subject. As far as I'm concerned, it's just the nature of the beast, and complaining won't make any difference.

The fact of the matter is that it takes 2 minutes to submit your site and if you're lucky enough to be accepted (the best way to look at it, in my view) then you could have a long term source of traffic and boosted search engine rankings, and it's free! If you don't get accepted then that still applies - it is free, it didn't cost you anything to try, and it only took 2 minutes. C'est la vie.

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