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Drumming Up Web Traffic on the Cheap
by Michael Winnick 2 Sep 1997

Michael Winnick

Page 1

Q: My culinary webzine Fillet hits the spot, but how do I get more people to visit it?
­ Adam

A: So you've built a well-designed site, and you have great content. Now all you need is an audience. Unfortunately, a Web site in need of exposure is about as rare as oxygen. There are roughly 100 million Web pages in the etherzone and well over a million unique domains. Of these, the top 10 percent receive about 90 percent of the overall traffic. Indeed the Web, often referred to as the land o' plenty, is a tough place for smaller sites to get exposure. To succeed, a site like Fillet needs to be crafty, sly, and, most importantly, determined.

Get a grip on your site

Before getting into shady marketing tactics, it's essential to have a sense of your site's current traffic, including the number of daily users, the number of pages they view, and if possible, what links they follow to come to your site. All this information is stored on server logs that you can pore over yourself or have checked by a shareware analyzer. It's also a good idea to check your rankings and placement in search engines and directories. Instead of doing this on your own, you may want to use a free Web tool.

The basic idea: It's traffic, stupid

There are only two ways to increase a Web site's traffic: Increase the number of new users coming to the site, or get your current users to look at more pages. (If you can think of more than that, please send résumés to jobs@hotwired.com.) In this column, I'll focus on the first part of the equation.

If you've got bank, go for broke: banner ads, paid links, press releases, print advertising, and, my personal favorite, transit ads. But before convincing Adam to drop coin on a bus campaign for Fillet (Meat. Are you over it? Or are you all over it?), I'll probably have to focus on guerrilla marketing, a quaint euphemism for marketing without a budget. Links, email, and word-of-mouth are the killer apps for online guerrilla marketing. They aren't sexy, but hey - they're free.

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