Multiple Doors of Entry

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Web Marketing Today, March 5, 1996, Issue 8

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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.