I once worked for Brink's. There were only two doors: one for
the armored cars and the other for the employees. Both closely
guarded, because inside employees would be counting out enough
bills and coins to cash a third of a million dollars in payroll
checks. But hospitality is different than security. The more open
doors you have, the more likely people are to drop by.
Strategy: increase the number of ways by which people can come
into your Web site. Don't just seek links from more pages and
Web search engines. Multiply the Web pages you advertise. Let
me give you an example from the Web site I know best.
Wilson Internet Services provides high quality, modestly-priced
Web page design for organizations and small business. So what?
There are thousands of Web page designers, and most of them have
company names that don't start so far down the alphabet as W.
To get people to come to our Web site we began an essentially
new Web site, Web Marketing Info Center (http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/) which now contains upwards of
2,000 links to on-line articles about marketing on the Web. The
idea is that people will come to the free service we offer, and
then be induced to come over to the part of our Web site where
we are selling our services. If you will, we have created a second
front door to our Web site. We also offer multiple bridges for
people to learn about our services:
Clickable display ads
Brief descriptive paragraphs with links
Hot-linked company name
This newsletter is a third door. Information about various e-zines
travels far and wide on the Internet, much farther than the reach
of our Web pages by themselves. People visit our archived back
issues at http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt/ and come to a third
door.
We also host a popular Web site "Christian Articles Archive"
which contains multiple links to Wilson Internet Services -- a
fourth door of entry attracting an entirely different slice of
the Internet.
Next, nearly every article which appears in Web Marketing Today,
including this one, will not only be archived in our newsletter
archive; we will also make each into a separate Web page which
is advertised independently to the Web search engines.
Two weeks ago we advertised two articles which had appeared in
previous issues. One of these articles brought 256 readers in
the past two weeks, the other 308. These visitors found them solely
on Web search engines, they are not linked elsewhere to my site.
To those of you who think 30,000 hits a day is the norm, that
won't be impressive, but these 564 visitors were looking
for information on Web marketing, in other words they are already
pre-qualified potential clients for Web page design services.
And they are 564 visitors who might not have found our Web site
otherwise.
One of our clients found that customers are especially inclined
to purchase their gift baskets on romantic holidays such as Valentine's
Day and Mother's Day. So we developed two additional front doors
advertised independently: one for each holiday. For another client
with a 35-page site we designed three sections of the site which
could be advertised independently. You can see the potential.
What are the lessons here? First, make sure your Web page designer
really understands how to market Web pages, not just how
to write them. Second, design your Web site with multiple doors
of entry in mind. You probably don't care which door your visitors
come in by, you'll just be glad to have all the visitors you can
get.
