Your Bright Idea
Photo by Fellipe Silva
Before we talking about how to promote your website you first need a website.
Perhaps you’ve already got one, or several, but if you don’t you’ll obviously need one. Otherwise what will you promote?
Websites can do many things, and be many things. But I’ve narrowed it down to five general types of website which you’ll find on the net…
Information, Business, Education, Entertainment and Social.
And in no particular order we will have a brief look at each…
Business
If you have a business site your methods of promotion are pretty simple: SEO (Search Engine Optimization, making sure you rank well in the search results of as many search engines that you can), sponsoring events, Advertising (PPC advertising programs such as Adwords) and on your work vehicles, business cards and Yellow Pages entry.
That’s about it really.
Don’t try and use the techniques, tactics, strategies or ideas I’ll be outlining in this series. No matter how hard you try, you will end up looking like a spammer.
But all is not lost, you can always create a site that falls in one of the other categories, and use these techniques. And run banner ads on that site to plug your business site.
The best place to start is to come up with an idea that has roots in something that you already have an interest in, be it a hobby or past time. More on that as we discuss the other types.
Entertainment
Think flash games, flash animation, web comics, music, fiction, video production…
If you’re a creative type of person pretty much anything you do can be transferred to the online world so it can entertain others.
Also witty banter on a blog would comfortably fall into this category.
Education
If you have the ability to pass on to others what you know in any of your creative pursuits (outlined in “Entertainment”) then you can also Educate people.
You can write “How To” articles!
But it’s not just restricted to that. Whether a person is a bricklayer or a dressmaker, fisherman or a remote control car enthusiast, if you have a gift whereby you can convey what you know to reach and teach those who don’t, then you have a talent that can not only draw a crowd but can make you money online.
“Content is king!” Is the cry heralded around the internet by Internet Marketing Gurus.
More importantly than that Unique Content Is King.
If you can bring to the table original content, that you can explain without losing the audiences interest while drawing from your wealth of experience then you should make a site about what you know.
Even if it’s giving away a few trade secrets, share it.
If you are a builder then make a website about DIY projects. Search engines gobble up that sort of stuff and dish it out when someone comes with a query trying to find a quality website.
You won’t be doing yourself out of a job, quite the opposite, use the site to advertise your business. If people have enough information to be able to do it themselves then a lot of them will realize that they don’t have the time, experience or contacts to do the job justice. And if you’re in their area then who are they going to call to do the job? The person who was honest with them in the first place. The person who took the time to educate them without a sales pitch.
Information
News, wikipedia type sites, product reviews…
There is a difference between educating someone and informing them.
- Perez Hilton isn’t telling you how to become a celebrity, he’s telling you about what the celebs are up to.
- Wikipedia can give you an excellent outline of the life and legend of King Arthur, but it won’t tell you how to make a coat of chainmail.
- A product review doesn’t tell you how to build your own computer, it tells you which are the best features in a comparison between 4 of the newest netbooks.
And a lot of people are searching for information. They do it every day, on Google and other search engines finding out the what’s, when’s and where’s.
Social
Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Forums
It would take a very unique twist to enter the ranks of the Facebooks, Myspaces and Twitters in terms of world domination but like any gold rush, there’s plenty trying. The same applies to contenders of bookmarking sites heavyweights Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us. These days you’ve got to go for the tightly focused niche. The narrower the better, as it’s far easier to find a passionate fanatic then a generic follower.
Forums have proliferated over the last ten years and installing them has never been easier with the likes of phpBB coming as a quick click installation via Fantastico in the webhosting cPanel. But if you can keep the spammers at bay you still have to get plenty of traffic and approximately 100 sign-ups before you have a chance of getting just one active participant. Of course once you find your tipping point and success kicks in you’ll have plenty of flaming, trolling and sockpuppets that need controlling, and it doesn’t take much for a community to split and a previously loyal segment of your regulars run off and start their own forum. It doesn’t matter if it’s individual groups of geeks, Christians or atheists, they’ll all find an area of common ground where they don’t agree and a point of contention.
UP NEXT: The Domain Name Game
Crash Course in Web Promotion
Since 2001/2002 I’ve been drafting a marketing document of sorts, about Web Promotion. It originally started as a “promotion report” for a company I was contracted to. I had collated a lot of stuff that I had stumbled on and learned in the previous two years, so most of that went in there. As well as other things I started looking into. Since then I’ve been adding points here and there and every now and then I think “I should really tidy this up and publish it”.
And I will.
In the meantime though I will be summarizing each chapter and distilling it into blog posts.
We’ll need a startpoint, so we’ll first discuss the type of site you have or the one you want to have, and from there we’ll begin our journey into innovative, imaginative and sometimes outright crazy website marketing and promotion ideas. The same tactics and strategies may also work for your hubs and lenses.
I don’t recommend that you use EVERY single suggestion to promote the one site or webpage, but use what we’ve discussed and tweak it to suit your purposes. Don’t try and force a square block into a round hole, not every webpage is suitable for a ‘digging’. You need to mix things up a bit and find the right fit, depending on where your audience is.
UP NEXT: Your Bright Idea
Joint Venture
A business partnership is easier said than done. There’s a lot of paperwork, legalities and also trust involved.
Do both parties have complementary talents? Is being the same or vastly different going to be a cause of conflict? Will it be a match made in heaven or a marriage made in hell?
I have friends, very close friends, whom I would not be involved with in a business. For various reasons and indeed I have attempted it more times than I care to admit. They weren’t all awful attempts at trying to forge a successful arrangement, but sometimes enjoying a friendship is a better choice than running the risk of losing that friendship because of the stress and strain of being in business with each other.
So I’ve had plenty of opportunities and instances where I’ve experienced when a joint venture didn’t take off as expected or turned sour, so fingers cross that this time, being older, wiser and far more cynical, I confident that Ben and I have all the right ingredients to make this work.
We are both creatively talented, though I often come up with the most off the planet ideas and bizarre plans. We both are mindful of the business of being in business, and Ben really gets into systems, work flow and job scheduling side of things. We have a fair amount of overlap and also each has strengths the other either does not possess or has some kind of have a rudimentary grasp.
Too many cooks aren’t spoiling our broth when the creative juices go on the boil. The old saying “two heads are better than one” really applies when we sit down and start kicking around ideas.
More soon!
Enormous Potential
Over the next few weeks I would drop in to Ben’s office once a week and we’d chat some more. I shared my knowledge of Search Engines, Adsense, affiliate programs, residual income, ideas for web 2.0 sites, and the list went on.
It was never a one sided conversation. One would talk, the other would have questions. We’d go off in a tangent. Most of the time we’d come back on topic. But the discussions were lively and interesting.
But talk is cheap. How do you go from just talking to actually doing? How could we make this work? Ideas are wonderful things but are worth nothing unless you do something with them. And what could I do in Ben’s business to make this happen?
During the course of these weeks I was telling my wife of the development of the conversation. She’s an inspiration and has worked many years in marketing. We enjoy each others company and can talk for hours about anything. We’re always thinking creatively and bouncing ideas off each other. We both agreed that the one thing Ben really needed to do was change his business name. What he had wasn’t particularly memorable. It grabbed a persons attention but only because no one was quite sure how to pronounce it.
Ben had bought the business three years earlier, and the name came with it. He was open to suggestions and figured if there was ever a time for rebranding, then now would be it.
Of course, that’s easier said than done.
During the course of our ongoing discussion about the direction of the business and what ideas and skills I could bring to it, we had kicked around the idea of a joint venture. And with me comes the name Startpoint. A name which I had intially registered in 2001 which lapsed for about 6 months from late 2004 to early 2005 (I had moved house and didn’t change the address details with the Department of Fair Trading ,the body responsible for Australian Business Name registration, and renewed it again in 2008 (business names are renewable every 3 years).
Startpoint is simple and easy. It implies something too, and invokes an image to prospective customers that we can be their startpoint to all things web related. Specifically for their business needs. In addition to owning startpoint.com.au I also of course own this domain, startpoint.biz. Which will very likely stay as it is now, as a personal blog of sorts, but with an ongoing theme.
There will be a business blog hosted at the new site. And I am hoping, in fact planning, to update both blogs regularly. So this blog should be updated frequently. Pretty much more of the same of what was originally intended.
But getting back to the original intent of this blog post…
After 2 or so months of regular visits and finding myself in the office more than once a week (it’s a Thursday as I write this and I’ve had to stop and think about it and its been every day this week), we’ve been kicking this idea around and its shaping itself into a plan. A workable plan too. And not just talking, but taking steps towards that goal.
Wheels are in motion!
I’ll be discussing more in the next blog post. To be continued!
Recent Comments