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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