Webforumz Newsletter - October 2007
Articles
Off-line Promotional techniques for your website
Having a fantastic website is all very well and good, but if no one knows that it exists then it is a complete waste of time and money. As one forum member's signature used to say "If no one knows about your site, the launch will be as successful as a lemonade stand smack dab in the middle of the Sahara Desert." It is all too easy to think that a few meta tags is going to get your site to the top of Google. There have been numerous discussions on the forum about the use of meta keywords and the general consensus is that meta keywords carry little, if any, weight any more. The debate is on-going so to be on the safe side I still use them, but I don't rely on them.
The process of search engine optimisation is a big one, and something that will not be discussed here. In fact, one of the main points I am going to try and get across is that you shouldn't rely solely on search engines for traffic. Here I am going to tell you some ways of promoting your website without even thinking about Google.
I believe that as a whole, web designers forget about off-line promotion all too easily. Most of us have our heads stuck inside a computer pretty much all of the time and we have a tendency to forget about the bigger world out there, I know I do. We are also very busy concentrating on the visual and technical aspects of actually getting the website launched. Before the mid-nineties most people didn't use the internet and it certainly was not perceived as the compulsory marketing tool for every business that it is today. But companies existed back then and businesses flourished. I am not saying that we should ignore on-line promotion, but rather that we should use off-line promotion to supplement search engine optimisation and promotion.
The Press and Media
A few years ago my company built an environmental product and information site for a local client, www.greenandeasy.co.uk. The clients were well informed about on-line and off-line promotion and part of their total budget and time was put aside for post launch promotion, something I consider essential for a successful website. They contacted many members of the local and national press and were featured in many magazines and newspapers. Within a short amount of time they were swamped with orders for their products and requests for information. A few months later I contacted the BBC with a small portfolio of my work and they picked the Green and Easy website which they reviewed on a television program which was aired across the globe. All it took for this to happen was to find someone who might be interested in the site and tell them about it.
The press love reporting about communities, after all, their main job is to report to them. We run an art community website www.voodoochilli.net, and although the vast majority of the visitors find the site via Google, many highly targeted visitors are there because they have read about us in magazines or heard about us from friends. The site has also featured on the BBC website on two occasions which has helped. Like most community sites, although its primary purpose is to serve and promote its members, a by-product of this is that it also helps promote the people that created it. In my opinion community sites are easier to promote than product sites. The reason is that promoting a site like webforumz.com for example is great for its members, but it also raises the profile of the people that created it, work on it, help test it and – It's in everyones interest for this kind of site to do well. Community sites also have the advantage that they tend to grow exponentially due to the fact that the more members a site has, the more referrals will be generated.
Journalists and reporters are desperate to find good news and promote it; it's their job, and they have impossible deadlines to meet. Concentrate on local and regional press initially as you are more likely to get a positive response. Make it easy for them by telling them why the site you are promoting is a worthy story and how it relates to their readers, listeners or viewers. Explain to them how useful it is to people and how it makes a difference to those that do use it. It is in your interest to have a clear understanding of these things anyway. Sometimes a press release can help clearly define this, and if they use you once they may just do a follow up feature in the future.
Word of mouth
Word of mouth has to be one of, if not the best form of off-line promotion. The best thing about it is that it is completely free. Gigantic websites like YouTube, Google and Facebook didn't grow simply because of huge marketing budgets (although it probably helped!). The simple fact is that if you offer a useful resource, be it a web application or just information that cannot be found elsewhere, people are going to talk about it. They are also going to link to you which in turn feeds your on-line promotion. The only major downside to word of mouth is that it can't be controlled and it can be negative. It also takes a long time to build up.
There are many other forms of off-line promotional techniques, some of which are listed below.
- Poster and flyers
- Mail shots
- Direct mail marketing
- Paid advertising
- Trade fairs and magazines
- Bill boards
- T-shirts
Guerilla Marketing
In 2002, Acclaim, the computer games giant offered people £500 ($1000) plus a free gaming console if they changed their name to 'Turok', the title of a game they were releasing. Think about this for a minute. £500 and a console really isn't much money to a company as big as Acclaim, and it received a lot of attention from newspapers, magazines and websites. I am writing about it now, 5 years later. One of the most fun ways of promoting your site or product is by this use of "Guerilla marketing". It is often quite shocking and bizarre so it's likely to get a lot of attention. Here are some examples:
- Get a bunch (the more the better) of your friends to wear identical, brightly coloured T-shirts printed with your logo or web address. Then make them sit somewhere together – like on a bus. People will not know what is going on and will start asking questions.
- In the past some brave people have run across a live soccer match wearing nothing but a temporary tattoo of their logo or web address to try and get some publicity! I cannot personally condone this because it is illegal, however it does show you the length some people will go to promote their brand!
- Pay for someone to have your logo on their forehead.
There are loads more out there, the wackier the better.
Advertising in Radio, Newspapers, Magazines and TV
Finally you could also consider paying for an advert. This tends to be a quite expensive way of marketing a site. A good little tip a client once shared with me is to prepare an advert for your local press and ask them only to use it when they have what is called "lay space". Simply put, they will use your advert when they don't have many others and you will make a considerable saving.
I hope that some of the above is useful to you and that you will consider off-line as well as on-line promotional techniques for your websites and projects in the future. It might also be a good idea to mention the idea to your clients when discussing the project budget.
Voodoochilli Design Ltd