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BUSINESS BASICS CHANNELS 
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Website Promotion Myths - Debunked As
a regular in some small business chat circles, and an active participant
in multiple message boards, I'm often asked how to go about promoting
a website. Quite often, the people doing the asking are at wits
end because their website has been online for a reasonable time
frame, and yet the traffic through the site is just not generating
the revenues they had hoped to see. There is traffic, and then there is Qualified Traffic. And the two are totally seperate items. In this article we'll examine some of the more commonly used techniques for generating traffic to a website (besides the search engines) and talk about ways in which we can improve the quality of that traffic. The site's done, you've submitted your site to all the major search engines and directories or perhaps, you paid someone to submit it for you. Now you're sitting back and waiting for the orders to start rolling in! Waiting waiting waiting.... First off, lets be realistic, with the delays in being accepted and indexed, it will be a minimum of four to six weeks before you start seeing any significant traffic to the site. The release of a website isn't like releasing a juggernaut on an unsuspecting enemy, its more like rolling a snowball down a snow covered hill, things start off slowly, and build up slowly. Its not a perfect world, but assuming everything went perfectly, within six weeks your site has been indexed and listed on the major search engines and directories (if that hasn't happened, its time to step back and ask "whats wrong with the design?"). Being listed is only one step in getting the word out in regard to your website. Now you're ready to promote, and when you're done promoting, you're ready to promote again and promote again and promote again. Most people at this point either throw up their hands and say "Its too much work!", or they start searching for alternate ways of promoting their website. Like everything else, its a dangerous world out there, there are a lot of "so called" promotional gimmicks that promise you the moon, but few of them are capable of delivering on the promise. Banner Exchanges (automated): Automated banner exchanges (ABE) are an interesting concept and deserve a really close look. An ABE is a system, running on one or more servers. The idea here is you provide the system with a banner and banner space on your pages. They provide you with an HTML codelet that you insert into your pages. Now when someone visits your website, they display someone elses banner on your pages. When enough people visit your site, it triggers the ABE to display your banner on someone elses website. Sounds simple eh? Not really, lets look at some basic facts, then do a little math. Banners should be considered like a mass mailing in as much as for every 100 flyers you send out, your response should be within the range of 1.5 to 2.5 percent (according to the Mass Marketing Mail Association). So for every 100 flyers, figure you get 1-2 customers. Banners work in a similar manner. For every 100 banners of yours that are displayed, you get 1-2 people to click on them. Now one of the biggest ABEs, formerly Link Exchange, but now called bCentral (and a part of Microsoft) is offering a 2:1 display ratio. This means that for every 2 banners you display, one of your banners gets displayed. REMEMBER THAT RATIO! Consider site purplemonsters.com (a fictious website). Purple Monsters markets a brand of childrens clothing for unruly kids. Their website has been online for over a year and they are doing nearly 1000 visitors per month, or roughly 250 visitors every week. Fairly average for a online small business. The webmaster of Purple Monsters signs up for bCentral and places the banner on his main page. For 1000 visitors per month, he gets a grand total of 500 banners displayed on other websites. Lets be generous and give him the higher percentage of click throughs, 2.5%. At 2.5%, this works out to a total of 12.5 click throughs in a month. THIRTEEN VISITORS, or, if you will, a net gain of only 1.2% of his total traffic. Statistically, this isn't even a hiccup in a graph. Lets try reworking the equation again, only this time the webmaster puts a banner on every page of his 10 page website. If we check his log files, we'll probably find that on average, a visitor hits four pages of the site, giving him a total of 4000 pageloads per month. With 4000 pageloads, we've had 2000 banners displayed for purplemonsters, from that we've gotten 50 visitors. 50 Visitors or 5% of the total traffic for site (or 1.25% of the total pageloads). What has this bought you? Remember you'll be lucky to get a response of 2.5 percent, so the extra 50 people, visiting four pages each, yeilded another 100 banners for you, or 2.5 click thoughs. Diminishing returns. Free automated banner exchanges sound like a great idea, but its one that rarely results in significant additional traffic. Additionally, there are other problems with ABEs. For one thing, you've agreed to display banners one your site, and the ABE makes the determination of which banners to display. You have little control over the quality of the banner, and, depending on the ABE system, the type of website the banner is representing. Some ABMs, like Microsoft's bCentral offering targetting of banners, others do not. So ask yourself before you join that banner program, "Do I really want someone elses banner on my site?". For all you know, it could be a terribly ugly banner, or one advertising inappropriate content, or worse yet, your competitor. Finally if you're still waivering on the idea of an ABE, ask yourself "If I'm trying to get people INTO my website, why am I so committed to giving them exit points on it?". The real winners in the ABE game are the paid advertisers and the ABE's themselves. Now having said all this, if you must join a banner exchange, we'd recommend bCentral, it offers you some measure of control over what you display. Manual Banner Exchanges/Reciprocal Links: Variations on a theme. Manual banner exchanges are merely graphical reciprocal links. Instead of exchanging text links with someone from another website, you're exchanging banners. Since the results of reciprocal linking is dependant on how heavily the other site is visited, your results will vary. There is ONE undeniable fact however. The more websites you can get to link to you, the better off your site will be in many of today's search engines. For that reason and that alone, it pays for you to build a special links page on your website. Put a link to that page on your main page. The idea here is simple. Concentrate all your outgoing links onto one page, and place it off to one side of your site. While we're not suggesting you hide the page, we're also not suggesting you advertise its presence with bells ringing and horns blaring. Remember, you want your visitors to stay on your website, not go tripping off on a link you provided them. Be choosey about who you link to. Rarely a week goes by without our receiving email from someone telling us they've linked to us. To be polite we always visit the website thats linking to see if its worthy of linking back. Over the years we've developed a policy concerning linking. Our [Northen Web] Search Engine Tutorial Link Policy: 1) We will not link to a purely commercial website. If the site contains nothing more than a sales pitch and a links page, they will not get a link. 2) We will not link to any site in the commercial promotional arena. Our tutorial is free and linking to such a site might appear as an endorsement. 3) We will not link to any site which we feel doesn't measure up to a reasonable standard of good web design. Sites containing broken images, too many animations, difficult or impossible to read text (due to color selections) are not linked to. You need to develop a policy of a similar nature. Perhaps not as exacting as ours, but it needs to be firmly fixed in your mind. Consider for example if a visitor from your site, takes one of these links and ends up at an ugly website, or worse, a site that crashes his/her browser. What are the odds of them returning to your site again? Nil I'd say. The hardest part of reciprocal linking is monitoring the folks you are reciprocating with, to make sure they haven't taken your link down. Its can be a tedious and boring process. For a small business website, reciprocal links are important. We'd suggest checking out LinkToLink, a software program which relieves you of a lot of the tedium, at $34.95 for the professional version, its a nice addition to your internet business toolkit. LinkToLink Reciprocal Link Software Web Rings: Conceptually web rings are very simple. This is a chunk of code that usually sits at the bottom of a webpage and allows the visitor to move between related websites. Basically this is software, a program which controls which sites people can go to. Usually one person starts a ring, becoming the ringmaster and they accept members to the ring. Lets put this issue to bed right here and now. In more than six years of developing web sites and systems, we have never seen a study, definitive, or otherwise, on the effectiveness of rings. This may be related to the fact that most ring members tend to own relatively minor, low traffic websites. There are, however, thousands of rings you can join, and if you go with the assumption that you're sticking with a topically oriented ring, then the traffic it brings you, should be targetted traffic. How sucessful you will be with the ring will depend largely on the sum total traffic received by all of the ring members. Finally, there is a conceptual problem with Webrings. If you're selling fly fishing lures, do you really want to link to other sites selling the same product? If you want to try a webring, check out the ones run by Yahoo. Free For All Link Directories: The first FFA system was invented by Matt Wright and is still available from Matt's Script Archive (http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/ ). In theory the idea was simple, provide a means, via a perl program, to allow people to leave their link on your website. A very rudimentary form of directory system. Now in its original form the concept was really nice. You'd bring in traffic to your website because they wanted a place to leave their link. Granted, the traffic wasn't targetted, but it worked nonetheless. Unfortunately along the way, the original FFA program mutated, changed, and became a trap. Here's how today's FFAs work. You submit your link, along with an email address. They take the link, and automatically send you email concerning whatever deal that particular website might be promoting. So in effect, for the price of a link, you're agreeing to be part of a mailing list, be it a one time list, or a many use list. This is a real sneaky tactic and one is forced to wonder about it ethically. The real question is did submitting your link to that FFA result in any traffic for you? No, not really. FFAs are heavily visited websites, but they are visited by submission bots, not people. If you've ever wondered where all those "18 MILLION SEARCH ENGINES FOR ONLY $19.99" are, well 99% of them are FFAs. Our recommendation? FFAs and you should not mix unless you going to install one, get on a submissions list and spam email everyone that submits their site to you. Chat Rooms: Chat room selling and promotion is for the web impaired. The idea here is to act as your own personal town crier and tell people about your website personally, or remotely via an online chat program. Chat room audiences are far too small to really make this a viable method of promoting your website. If your time isn't worth all that much to you, promote your site in a chat room. But you'll find if you sat down and worked out the numbers, the generation of viable leads from the chat room are probably putting you in a less than minimum wage bracket. Ezines/Webzines: These two are very closely related. An Ezine is an email based magazine sent out on a periodic basis. A Webzine is very similar only instead of sending out an email periodically, you're updating a website. Both of these, if done right, are excellent methods of generating qualified traffic to your website. Like the site itself, these items will not immediately generate gobs of traffic, but over time, as the readership grows, will start to supply upwards of 20% of your overall site traffic for an ezine, and upwards of 60% of your traffic for a webzine. Zines basically fall into two catagories. One much more productive than the other. If you're going to put together a zine, remember thats its unique and useful content that people want. Don't put together a zine containing nothing more than ads, and remember to spell check it! If you do not have the time or energy to spend several hours a week preparing unique content for your zine, then perhaps this is not a viable traffic generating alternative for you. Fight the urge: One of the most common and largest time and money wasters out there is the continual effort to redesign the website. This is something I've seen time and time again. A person's visitor count is low, so rather than trying to analyze the problem, they immediately think a new look, new buttons etc will improve the visitor count. Fight this urge! The problem here is one of a thought process. Changing the look and or feel of your website really won't bring in additional visitors unless you are redesigning specifically to improve your positioning in the search engines. If your visitor count is low, step back and look at the problem. Are you placed well in the search engines? Is there something in your html preventing every page in your site from being spidered? Look at the log files, are people coming into the main page and then leaving? It may be that your design is fine, but your salescopy isn't. It could be you've attracted too many unqualified visitors, or it might even be something as simple as you're selling XYZ to a world dependant on ABC, so the demand for your product is unusually low. Don't immediately assume that you need to redesign the website. Look at the problem first, analyze it, then make a plan of action. Content additions: Considering the item above, this option for generating traffic is going to sound like a contradiction to it. But as you'll see, its not. Lets assume your selling Nuts and Bolts for Nuts & Bolts Mfg company. The website has a listing of some of the various nuts and bolts on it, a price list and an order form. Nice, simple, and too the point. Or is it? Look at your buyers! In the case of something like Nuts and Bolts, you're not only going to see the various doityourselfer and hardware store owner, you're also going to see mechanical engineers and other technical specialists. These people want more than just a few pictures and an order form. They want to see technical specifications, information on the manufacturing processes, maybe even a white paper or two on some of the specialized uses for your nuts and bolts. I hear you, your saying "this doesn't apply to me! I sell Gift baskets!", but you're wrong. Engineering companies learned a long long time ago what everyone else is only beginning to learn today. That an educated consumer turns into a customer, and if you take the trouble to educate your consumer, they will come back to you time and time again. Your website isn't merely an extension of your business into cyberspace, it also needs to be a cyber-classroom where you teach your visitor what they need to know in order to be able to make a reasonable purchasing decision. This isn't always easy, but I can guarantee its worth the effort. Not only will it go a long way to turning that semi-qualified visitor into a buyer, but it will also turn the fully qualified buyer into a repeat buyer. Summary: In this article we've examined some of the more common tools people use to attempt to bring traffic to thier website. Some of these items like Reciprocal Linking, Ezine/Webzines and additional content work very well while others like ABEs, FFA's, Chat rooms and Web Rings have limited value. Promotion of your website is an ongoing process, some methods and gimmicks work, some don't. The options listed here aren't the only ones available to people. Regardless of what method you use, remember that your ultimate goal isn't to bring in traffic, its to bring in Qualified Traffic. Used
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