Basically, the Internet is not just a library of information or a collection of stores. It is a way to connect people to people. A company Web site (either external or internal) should be the focal point for discussion about topics that are crucial to that business, and an important element in building relationships with customers, partners, and employees. This mode opens ways of working and business opportunities that have never been seen before. The revolution comes from people, not from technology and processes. The major challenges are ones of people management.
It is possible to build effective Internet businesses simply and at low cost. Expensive design approaches should be used only when there is a direct benefit to be gained, which is rarely the case for small- and medium-sized businesses. To get beyond the hype and flash and the temptation to imitate other sites, to keep your focus on your business objectives, senior management as well as marketing and the Web technical staff all need to get the same message so that they are starting from the same basic understanding and speaking the same language. This message can empower them to trust their business common sense which they have learned through years of experience, and which they are now tempted to abandon.
There are three key questions you should ask yourself when developing an Internet business strategy.
Would you like to look at your own business from this perspective and see where that might take you? Consider an introductory one-hour consulting session by telephone. For details, email seltzer@samizdat.com or call 617-469-2269.
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Search engines, like AltaVista, index every single word on every page they find -- including the order of the words. Hence the more text you have on the Web -- in simple, search-engine-friendly form -- the more likely your pages will be found. Those who find your pages and like what they see are likely to bookmark them and tell others about them and/or create links to your pages. Hence the marketing value of such content increases over time, as it becomes more ingrained in the search and link structure of the Web, even as its information value decreases over time.
From these observations, we can derive the basic principles of content-based marketing:
1) Make as much text available on the Web as possible.
2) Design the pages to make them easy for search engines to find, and with the most important information in the HTML title and the first couple lines of text.
3) Do not discard Web pages because their information is no longer current. Rather add links from old pages to new pages with related current information.
4) If your business model depends on using design features which block search engines (e.g., dynamic pages, frames, java applets) or if corporate branding rules prevent you from creating text-heavy, search-engine friendly pages and/or prevent you from retaining old content, create a non-branded Web site, using inexpensive ISP-hosted Web space, and use that site to launch your content-based marketing efforts.
5) From every content-marketing page, point visitors to current and related information at your site, and to the starting point at your main Web site that will provide them with the most useful experience.
For example, when you discontinue a product, your first inclination is to remove all mention of it from your Web site, to make sure all your content is current. If you go out of your way to update search engines with all the pages you have changed and to remove dead pages from their indexes, a potential customer interested in that product will get no results at all from your site. And if you update your site without updating the search engines, that customer will click on dead search engine links, and may give up in frustration. You would be much better off keeping the old pages and the old mentions of the discontinued products and adding to those pages explanations and links to your latest and greatest products. That way you help would-be customers rather than slamming the door in their face.
Basically, content-based marketing takes advantage of the full text of every document you are willing to make public, and gives new life to old pages. This is an application of my "fly-paper" principle for drawing traffic to a Web site (see www.samizdat.com/socintro.html and /soc1.html). In contrast, "search engine optimization" focuses narrowly on raising you higher in the results lists for searches for specific "key words."
Unfortunately, the design rules and tools of most major corporations make their pages almost invisible to search engine crawlers, depriving them of the traffic that their content would otherwise draw to their site by way of search engines. Richard can provide insight into what might be preventing your content from being indexed, and what you can do to improve your ranking. In many cases, creation of search-engine-friendly mirror pages and a sitemap page can boost your traffic significantly, while you keep your current branded user-friendly pages unchanged. Ask for a Web-site diagnosis and suggestions for improvement, and/or have him implement the necessary changes himself. With your query, please include a brief description of your site, its goal, its target audience, and its size.
A fuller discussion of
content-based marketing , RealAudio
version of that article
See his article
"How to use content to attract traffic to your Web site, even when branding
rules saddle you with a search-engine unfriendly design"
Examples of sites using mirror pages and site map: www.jeremyjosephs.com
(attractive user-friendly site which got no traffic), www.jeremyjosephs.com/sitemap.html
(the mirror page approach); www.richardtosti.com
(original site), www.richardtosti.com/plain.html
(mirror page), www.richardtosti.com/sitemap.html
(sitemap
page)
Basically, you need content -- lots of useful, practical articles that explain all aspects of your business for a customer audience. This content could reduce the number of customer questions requiring time-consuming individual answers. At the same time, if properly indexed at the major search engines, this content could drive more traffic -- i.e., more prospects -- to your Web site.
If you want a professional to help generate this content, turn to Richard Seltzer. He has 25 years of experience as a professional writer -- interviewing executives, engineers, and marketing people and turning their experience and insights into clear, interesting, and informative articles. He also understands the workings of public search engines, so he can structure and format those articles to maximize the likelihood that people looking for information of that kind will find those articles. seltzer@samizdat.com
To order a videotape of a recent speech by Richard Seltzer about "The Future of the Internet and the Future of Business" ($20), send email to seltzer@samizdat.com, or order at Amazon.com
To order Richard's classic 3-minute tape "A Glimpse of the Future" which in January 1994 defined the future of commerce on the Internet ($10), send email to seltzer@samizdat.com (This tape was winner of Internet World's first Internet Marketing Award in the spring of 1994).
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To order a videotape of a recent speech by Richard Seltzer about "The Future of the Internet and the Future of Business" ($20), send email to seltzer@samizdat.com, or order at Amazon.com
Testimonials, Return to top of page
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business success.
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