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Even highly placed managers and well-financed entrepreneurs sometimes get the uncomfortable feeling that they are at the mercy of their "experts," like the emperor was at the mercy of his tailors -- that they are paying top dollar for magical cloth, when cotton would do just fine.
You can feel the impact of the Internet on your business. To you it's like an earthquake, which you couldn't predict and can't control. But unlike a quake, it just won't go away. Every day you learn about another startup Internet company that is suddenly worth billions, or another traditional company laying off or cutting back or going under. Even if your company has a Web site, when you pore over the financial stats of your own company, you can't help but wonder whether the trend lines might be affected by your competition using of the Internet better than you are; and yet you'd be hard put to recognize "better."
Imagine that someone asked you, "What's the most important design element of a Web page?" You'd start thinking of all the techno buzz words you've heard and read about, and you'd have no way to sort them out. 3D graphics? Animation? Audio? Video? Java applets? Frames? Database access?
But the answer is words -- just words. Nothing matters more than the words on your pages.
How can you get people to return to your site, repeatedly, and perhaps become part of a "community" of visitors? Rewards programs? Dynamic personalized experiences? Quick and easy secure transactions? Auctions? Games?
All of those might help, but so could words -- just words.
You can 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. The key question is not "What can technology do?" but rather "What makes sense for your business?"
For instance, do all your potential customers already know you and have business relationships with you? If that's the case, then your approach to business on the Internet would indeed be very different than if you need to attract and interact with unknown prospects. When you already know your customers, you can talk to them and work with them to provide just the information and experiences that they want, and remind them regularly when there's new material they can benefit from.
Dealing with the unknown -- trying to draw likely prospects to your site -- can be far trickier. That's where you often go astray, trying to mimic familiar tactics in this new environment.
You might, for instance, think of a Web site as if it were a magazine, and a "home page" as if it were the magazine's cover. Consumer magazines invest heavily in photos and other graphical elements for their cover because that's what attract buyers at news stands. But, on the Internet, people don't see your "home page" before they get there. Images and fancy effects don't attract visitors, rather they make your page slower to load; and no matter how eye-pleasing and exciting the visual experience, it loses its novelty on the second visit and the third, and the slowness becomes increasingly, painfully evident.
So how and why do people find your Web site?
If your company's name is a household word, and if you spend heavily in mass-market advertising through traditional media, you'll probably get plenty of traffic by people just typing www.yourname.com and hence going straight to your home page. Of course, the large companies that have such a luxury face another problem -- often they have diverse product lines, but their brand advertising focuses on one small part of all that they do. Brand probably hurts those off-brand products. Even business-to-business customers would not know or immediately recall that that company makes many of the things that they do.
If your name is not a household word or if it's your job to market the off-brand products of a branded company, what's the most effective and least expensive way to build traffic to your Web site? Traditional advertising? Banner advertising? Games? Sweepstakes? Offers of free products and special deals? Link exchanges? Affiliate programs?
Once again, the answer is words -- just words.
On the Internet, people often navigate using hyperlinks and search engines. Hyperlinks are convenient pointers from one page to another, often included because the creator of one page believes the content of another is useful or interesting. Search engines match query words and phrases with the content which they have indexed from all over the Web and, ideally, point the visitor to the most relevant pages. Home pages have no special significance and graphic effects are irrelevant. To search engines, all pages are equal in importance, and their most important element is their searchable text.
On the Web, text content can be of value to you in a variety of ways -- selling discrete chunks of it, selling by subscription, and also turning it into a marketing asset. In some cases, the marketing value of posting content for free can far exceed what you might hope to get through online sales of the same content. This is especially true of content related to Internet business and technology, which seems to have a useful half-life of less than a year.
Search engines (like AltaVista, www.altavista.com) 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 though its information value decreases over time.
From these observations, we can derive the basic principles of content-based marketing:
Also, since old content is valuable for attracting traffic, consider adopting business models that move content as it ages from a closed paid area to an open public searchable area, deriving revenue from it until its marketing value is greater than its value as an information asset.
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."
To prioritize your marketing activities, imagine a series of concentric circles. In the center is content that is fully indexable text. The next circle represents content-based links -- the links that people make to your pages voluntarily, because they like what they see. The next circle represents the links that come from affiliate programs and link exchanges -- the results of business arrangements. And the outer circle is advertising, used to promote time-limited offers and special events.
Everything should build on the content at the center. That's where you should focus your main effort.
What about the rapidly increasing size of the Web? With hundreds of millions of Web pages available, it's already difficult for ordinary individuals to find what they want using search engines. At some point -- if we're not there already -- search engines will become ineffective, and users will fall back on brand recognition and links from "portals," which are entry sites designed to make it easy for newcomers to go where they want to go.
Fortunately, advanced filtering technology (from companies like iAtlas, www.iatlas.com), are already making search engines far more effective, letting you focus your searches by industry, geography, popularity, or other factors. In all probability, today's portals will move away from their dependence on hand-constructed directories to use of filtered searches to automatically generate comprehensive and up-to-date directories. That means that the text content of Web pages is likely to become increasingly important for generating traffic.
What about the direction of technology? As high bandwidth access becomes more readily available at attractive prices, won't multi-media become increasingly important? Doesn't that mean that the Internet will become more of a television-style medium, and text take a back seat?
Today, and for the immediate future, video over the Internet is very different from video over television. And longer term, we can expect television to become more like the Internet, rather than vice versa.
Television presents a linear stream of images and sounds. Yes, with videotape, you can record that content and play it back at another time, and be a bit selective -- fast forwarding and rewinding to avoid some parts and see others again. But your control is very limited. And if you have never seen a particular program before, the only way to determine what's on it is to slowly, tediously fast-forward. You would probably never consider going through hundreds of hours of tape to find a particular passage -- it would simply not be worth your time.
Internet-style video is stored digitally. Yes, you can receive the images "streaming" in real time over the Internet (as with RealVideo from Real Networks, www.real.com), rather than downloading and storing the content for replay. But hundreds or thousands of individuals can access different parts of the same program at the same time. And technology (from companies like Virage, www.virage.com) uses the capabilities of voice recognition to make digital video and audio fully searchable, like text. Also, thanks to advances in storage technology, the cost of saving video in digital form on hard drives is rapidly approaching the cost of storing it in far less useful form on videotape. Hence, in the near future, you should be able to search through thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of hours of video content, as quickly as you search through hundreds of millions of Web pages today. In other words, video content will become an extension of text content -- another important element in helping people find your Web site, another instance of the power of words on the Internet.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
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For a thorough discussion of this topic, buy Richard's book Web Business
Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
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