Issue 39, December 1, 1997
Welcome to Issue 39 of Web Marketing Today, which is e-mailed free to 31,561 subscribers around the world.
In this issue:
- The Web Marketing Checklist: 23 Ways to Promote Your Site
- Web Marketing Today Links
- Review: Increase Your Web Traffic in a Weekend
- Review: Measuring the Impact of Your Web Site
- Odds 'n' Ends
The Web Marketing Checklist:
23 Ways to Promote Your Site
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
You have a website, but it isn't getting the number of visitors you'd like. What can you do to stimulate traffic? Here's a checklist of 23 items you need to consider. Of course, a great deal has been written about this. You'll find links to many of these articles on the site promotion page of our Web Marketing Info Center http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/promote.htm. While we're not breaking any new ground here, we've tried to summarize some of the most important techniques.
The most important first step is to register your site with the main Web search engines, so we begin with steps to prepare your Web pages for optimal indexing. The most up-to-date information can be found at Mecklermedia's Search Engine Watch http://www.searchenginewatch.com developed by Danny Sullivan.
| ___ | 1. Write a Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title, such as "the," "and," etc. This page title appears on the Web search engines when your page is found. Entice surfers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the Web page between the <HEADER></HEADER> tags, in this format: <TITLE>Web Marketing Checklist -- 23 Ways to Promote Your Site</TITLE> |
| ___ | 2. List Keywords. Prepare a list of 50 to 100 keywords -- the kind
of words that if someone entered one of these words, you'd like him to find your site.
Make sure that you don't repeat any word more than three times. Place those words at the
top of the Web page, between the <HEADER></HEADER> tags, in a META
tag in this format: <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="promoting, promotion, Web marketing, online sales ..."> |
| ___ | 3. Write a Page Description. Select the most important 20
keywords, and write a careful 200 to 250 character (including spaces) sentence or two. You
don't need to repeat any words used in the page title. Keep this readable but tight.
Eliminate as many "filler" words as you can, to make room for the important
words, the keywords which do the actual work for you. Place those words at the top of the
Web page, between the <HEADER></HEADER> tags, in a META tag in this
format: <META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Increase visitor hits, attracting traffic through submitting URLs, META tags, news releases, banner ads, and reciprocal links"> |
| ___ | 4. Submit Page to Search Engines. Next, submit your page to the important Web search engines and directories. To do this, consider using a submission service such as Submit-It http://www.submit-it.com and All4one Submission Machine http://www.all4one.com/all4submit/ The most important search engines which robotically "spider" your site are: AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek, and WebCrawler. |
| ___ | 5. Submit Page to Yahoo. Yahoo is probably the most important listing of all -- though it's technically a directory, rather than a search engine. It uses real humans to read (and too often, pare down) your 200 character sentence, so be very careful, and follow their instructions. http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/include.html |
| ___ | 6. Submit Page to Other Directories. You've probably seen offers to submit your pages to 300 different search engines. Don't bother. The most important 25 are probably enough, unless you find some specific to your industry. Many of the rest are wannabe's that solicit you for "upgraded listings." These marginal directories come and go very quickly making it hard to keep up. |
| ___ | 7. Request Links on Industry Sites. You probably belong to various trade associations that feature member sites. Ask for a link. |
| ___ | 8. Include URL on Stationery, Cards, and Literature. Make sure that all reprints of cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company's URL. And see that your printer gets the URL syntax correct, with slashes leaning right rather than left. |
| ___ | 9. Include URL in Display Advertising. We don't recommend discontinuing print advertising you've found to be effective. But be sure to include your URL in any display or classified ads you purchase in trade journals, newspapers, etc. View your website as an information adjunct to the ad. Catch readers' attention with the ad, and then refer them to a Web page where they can obtain more information or perhaps place an order. |
| ___ | 10. Develop a Free Service to Market. It's one thing to say,
"Come to our site and learn about our business." It's quite another to say
"Use the free kitchen remodeling calculator available exclusively on our site." Make no mistake, it's expensive in time and energy to develop free resources such as our Web Marketing Info Center http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/ but it is very rewarding in increased traffic to your site. Make sure that your free service is closely related to what you are selling, so the visitors you attract will also be good prospects for your business. Give visitors multiple opportunities to enter the part of the site where you're marketing your product or service. |
| ___ | 11. Request Reciprocal Links. Find complementary websites and request a reciprocal link to your site (especially to your free service, if you offer one). Develop an out-of-the way page where you put links to other sites -- so you don't send people out the back door as fast as you bring them in the front door. |
| ___ | 12. Issue News Releases. Find newsworthy events (such as the launching of your free service), and send news releases to print and Web periodicals in your industry. You may want to use a Web news release service, such as one offered by Eric Ward's URLwire http://www.urlwire.com |
| ___ | 13. Request Links from Business Link Sites. Especially if you offer a free service, you can request links from many of the small business linking pages on the Web. When you have something free to offer, many doors open to you. Surf the Net looking for places that might link to your site. Then e-mail the site owner or webmaster with your site name, URL, and a brief 200-word description of what you offer there. |
| ___ | 14. Capture Visitor E-mail Addresses and Request Permission to Send Updates. On your website's response form, include a checkbox where the visitor can give you permission to e-mail updates about products or services. Now your e-mails to visitors are not "spam." You're responding to their request for more information. |
| ___ | 15. Publish an E-Mail Newsletter. While it's a big commitment in time, publishing a weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletter is one of the very best ways to keep in touch with your prospects, generate trust, develop brand awareness, and build future business. You can distribute your newsletter using your e-mail program, or have people subscribe on your website directly to a Majordomo program offered by your Internet Service Provider. More information can be found at http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/majordomo.htm |
| ___ | 16. Install a "Signature" in your E-Mail Program. Most e-mail programs such as Eudora or Netscape allow you to designate a "signature" to appear at the end of each message you send. Limit it to 6 to 8 lines: Company name, address, phone number, URL, e-mail address, and a one-phrase description of your unique business offerings. Look for examples on e-mail messages sent to you. |
| ___ | 17. Promote Your Site in Mailing Lists and News Groups. The Internet offers thousands of very targeted mailing lists and news groups made up of people with very specialized interests. Use DejaNews http://www.dejanews.com to find appropriate sources. Don't bother with news groups constituted of pure "spam." Instead, find groups where a dialog is taking place. Don't use aggressive marketing, even if you see other jerks doing so. Rather, join in the discussion and let the "signature" at the end of your e-mail message do your marketing for you. People will gradually get to know and trust you, visit your site, and do business with you. |
| ___ | 18. Join a Mall. You may gain a little traffic this way, but not a lot. The biggest and free-est mall, if you will, is Yahoo. Get a good listing there, and you won't need other malls very much. |
| ___ | 19. Announce a Contest. People like getting something free. If you publicize a contest or drawing available on your site, you'll generate more traffic than normal. |
| ___ | 20. Join a Banner Exchange Program. Of the many banner exchange programs, LinkExchange is the biggest. http://www.linkexchange.com Essentially, you agree to show a rotating banner on your site for other LinkExchange members, and they do the same for you. |
| ___ | 21. Purchase Banner Ads on Appropriate Sites. You may need to spend money to boost traffic by purchasing banner advertising. Choose sites that seem to attract the kinds of people who would be good prospects for your business or product. Expect to pay $10 to $40 per thousand people who see your ad, and achieve a click-through rate of 1% to 2%. You can find media brokers such as WPRC http://www.wprc.com who can help you find appropriate and cost-effective places to advertise. |
| ___ | 22. Use traditional promotional media. You may decide to use traditional media to drive people to your site, such as direct mail, classifieds, display ads, etc. This can be especially helpful in smaller industry niches. |
| ___ | 23. Rent targeted e-mail lists. We abhor "spam," bulk untargeted, unsolicited e-mail. But the direct marketing industry has developed targeted e-mail lists you can rent of people who have agreed to receive commercial e-mail messages. Some companies which offer such services are listed at http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/lists.htm |
We certainly haven't exhausted ways to promote your site, but these will get you started. To effectively market your site you need to spend some time adapting these strategies to your own market and capacity. Right now, why don't you make an appointment for later in the week to go over this checklist with someone else in your organization, and make it the basis for your new Web marketing strategy.
Web Marketing Today Links
As we announced in our November 1, 1997 issue, we now e-mail the "Links of Interest to Web Marketers" only to subscribers. Here's why.
For each issue, it takes several days to scour the Web for articles and resources. With the glut of material on the Net, you value those links even more than you used to. But it also takes us much longer to complete our monthly search and annotations. We just can't do it for free any longer.
You have learned much in the past two years from Web Marketing Today. Its links have introduced you to many marketing techniques which have now become your stock-in-trade. But the learning partnership you and I have forged over these years threatens to break down. The Internet Service Provider who e-mails out 31,000 copies of WMT needs to purchase an expensive program to continue to service this huge list (hence the shorter issue you are reading now).
If you're a merchant, a Web marketing consultant, an ISP, or have responsibility for your company website, you can't afford to ignore the rapid changes taking place. Electronic commerce is projected to exceed $1 trillion by 2001. Ignore it for a few months and you've lost your competitive edge! The November 15, 1997 issue of Web Commerce Today contained 99 links to new articles and resources tightly focused on e-commerce issues. That's the way the world is going; we have no choice but to fasten our seat belts and learn how to sell -- really sell -- products directly on the Web.
Your subscription to Web Commerce Today also includes full access to our exclusive Electronic Commerce Research Room http://www.wilsonweb.com/research/ which contains 400+ links to e-commerce articles and resources, and grows by 75 to 100 links per month. The Electronic Commerce Research Room is to e-commerce what our Web Marketing Info Center is to Web marketing and promotion.
When you think about it, for only $49.95 annually we keep you up-to-date on both Web marketing and e-Commerce. If you value your time as money, that $49.95 will save you many hundreds of dollars you'd otherwise squander coaxing information piecemeal from some mindless search engine. We make it easy for you.
I hope you'll decide to subscribe online at http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/.
If you sign up in the next 10 days, we'll immediately e-mail you the December 1st collection of 77 links in Web Marketing Today Links, Issue 39.
Review: Increase Your Web Traffic in a Weekend
by William R. Stanek (Prima Publishing, 1998)
If you've just put up a site and need to learn how to promote it yourself, you'll find this a very helpful book indeed. The author has divided the material into five sections corresponding to each part of a weekend.
Friday Evening covers introductory material. The real work begins on:
Saturday Morning: First you gain understand about who your visitors are from looking for patterns in the website's log files. The author also makes the helpful suggestion of gaining lost readers by finding problems with your website from error logs.
Saturday Afternoon: "Putting the Motion in Promotion." Here the author goes into some detail about how search engines work, and then explains exactly what the six key search engines -- Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and WebCrawler -- are looking for, and what will cause you problems. There is considerable information on how to construct META tags, as well as using NOFRAME tags correctly so frame sites are correctly indexed.
Sunday Morning: The next step is registering with the primary business search engines, yellow pages directories, industry-specific directories, and specialized directories, and learning how to win a "Cool Site of the Day" recognition.
Sunday Afternoon: The weekend concludes with how to use registration services such as Submit-It, using e-mail to promote the site on mailing lists and news groups, offering freebies, soliciting reciprocal links, and signing up with various banner exchange programs.
Though this type of book becomes out-of-date
rather quickly, if you purchase it soon, you'll get a lot of valuable, hands-on advice.
Rather than teaching principles of Web marketing, the book focuses on the howto's of site
promotion. I found it practical, readable, and quite useful for first-timers.
Review: Measuring the Impact of Your Web Site
by Robert W. Buchanan, Jr. and Charles Lukaszewski (Wiley, 1997) 
If you have to justify corporate expenditures for your website, or develop a budget to fund your company's Web presence, you'll find this book extremely useful. Its subtitle offers a good idea of content: Proven yardsticks for evaluating customer impact, site evolution, revenue growth, and return on investment (ROI).
Early chapters introduce the basic concepts of measurement and site justification, and then survey of various measurement strategies and data sources -- primarily logfiles, customer surveys, as well as company expense information. Interspersed with a discussion are brief case studies from a handful of sites: FedEx, Travelocity, Silicon Graphics, Toro, the Star Tribune, the US Senate, and others. They provide helpful real life examples to illustrate the points being made.
Later chapters provide a number of examples of how various impacts can be calculated. For example, the cost reduction justification strategy is divided into four categories in a chart:
- Appropriate raw measures of data in the bottom section, then
- Consolidated measures , which use a formula, applied to the data to produce some meaningful figure.
- Assumptions and approximations specify the hypotheses which underlie the conclusion, and the top section of the chart states the
- Impact measure , in this case, how much money was saved by distributing literature over the Web, saving costs of printing, handling, and distribution via traditional means.
The examples cover most of the areas which would be used in a typical corporation to justify Web expenditures, and are well worth the price of the book.
While this book may not help you market your company better on the Web, it will provide beancounters the justification they need to fund your Web project, as well as provide an "authoritative" basis for your projections.
Odds 'n' Ends
Important as money is, making
money isn't what Christmas is about. Christmas is a birthday. To help you get into the
spirit of Jesus' birthday, why don't you take a look at the Christmas short stories and articles
I've written at http://www.joyfulheart.com/xmas/
My favorite is "Joseph's Letter Home." While this may sound silly, it still brings tears to my eyes when I read it. http://www.joyfulheart.com/xmas/joseph.htm
This is my Christmas gift to my thousands of Web marketing friends in 75 countries around the world. Merry Christmas and God bless you!
We feel very honored by the two pages of kind
words John December wrote about our Web Marketing Info Center in his World
Wide Web Unleashed, 1997 edition. John is one of the most respected Internet
gurus you can find, and edits the Computer-Mediated Communications Magazine. Thank
you, John, for your gracious recognition of this important resource.
Our Web Marketing Info Center was also
chosen as a selection by the Scout Report for Business
and Economics for November 6, 1997. The Scout Report is a widely used and highly
respected publication recognizing the best resources on the Net.
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/bus-econ/index.html
Our Electronic Commerce Research Center hasn't been around nearly as long as the Web Marketing Info Center, but it's of the same high quality, and is the best resource of its kind on e-commerce you'll find on the Web. http://www.wilsonweb.com/research/
Our Web Marketing Bookstore features the most important books in the field at discount prices, usually 20% to 30% off retail prices. We are associated with Amazon.com Books, which delivers books internationally as well as in the US with a minimum of hassle. Why don't you take a look at our recommendations at http://www.wilsonweb.com/books/marketing.htm
Merry Christmas to all!
