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05.22.07
Web Site Marketing Tips: What’s Old Is New
 By
Lee Odden
In the late nineties, the current search marketing buzz words, "link bait", "social media", "search engine PR", etc were nowhere near the lexicon of web masters tasked with promoting web sites.
Sage advice of the day centered on evangelizing the internet as a channel first, and then focusing on web sites as the vehicle.
The logical question of, "How do I get people to visit my web site" from new web site owners would come up and advice often centered around using familiar marketing principles for web site promotion. For example, telling site owners to print their web site address wherever they were printing their phone number: on business cards, signage, direct mail and collateral, stationary, advertisements and even including it in hold music.
As players like Google came on the scene, the importance of link popularity and then the huge budget allocations to paid search made a number of effective site promotion tactics fall by the wayside. As the title of this post implies, what's old is new again. Here are a few long term, tried and true tactics for promoting web sites and effectively engaging users.
Site announcements. Online editors on high profile portal sites and publications continue to provide a significant opportunity for web site exposure. Another way to describe this tactic would be online media relations. Researching online publications and pitching writers or site editors on story ideas is not all that different than offline media relations. Many publications both online and in print run features that announce new web sites (and increasingly, blogs) of interest to the readership.
I asked the grandmaster site announcement, link building and web marketing guru, Eric Ward, about site announcements as a way to drive web site traffic and he offered these three tips:
1). The more powerful a person is to help your site get exposure the less likely they are to ever be reached by a mass distributed press release. In other words, who has time to weed through 15,000 press releases a day to find the two that actually say something?
2). Take the time to research your industry for key influencers and vertical news distribution options. For example, if your news is about a new Christian web site, don't rely just on traditional new distribution outlets, use a niche service like Christian Newswire. I have a database of hundreds of topical and niche news wires and key influencers I've researched myself over the years, so I know it can be done and will yield excellent results.
3). In many cases the people you should reach out to are not members of the media in the traditional sense. For example, when I announced a new Curious George educational site launched by PBS, I looked for contacts that maintained high trust web sites that would be most inclined to care about the Curious George content. An example? The Schaumburg Township District Library Cool Preschool Links page. I assure you the person that maintains this page does not think herself as a "media contact", and is not looking for your press release or site announcement. You need to find these venues and reach out to them on an individual basis. This takes time, effort, and patience, and trust me, it works.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He's been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.
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