Optimize Online First – Then Go Off! Literally
Website success is a complex art and science, as regular readers of our reports know all too well.
To ensure that you get the kind of traffic, attention, ratings, and commercial results you want you need to invest in and manage a wide array of different strategies and tactics.
Something many even seemingly savvy Internet entrepreneurs don’t even think about is the huge opportunity out there to leverage all the traditional media that has always been used for marketing and advertising.
All the Old Marketing Ways Work for the Web Too Consider it. Forget about banners and links and search engines for a second.
Is your Website a marketing tool or a destination in itself? In most cases the answer is both.
So if you think of your Website as your online “storefront,” which it may very well be literally, think for a minute of all the ways businesses have always advertised and marketed themselves, before the Internet even came along:
• Print ads
• TV
• Radio
• Inserts
• Magazine and newspaper articles
• Classifieds
• Direct mail
• Direct response
• Local “distribution” channels
In this report we’ll explore each of these, and how you can use them right now to improve the performance and results for your online business.
Before we go “back to the future” of advertising and marketing, first you want to be sure you optimize your site itself.
How to Leverage the Off-Line World to Improve Your Online Results
Then you want to optimize your so-called “offsite” strategies, the combination of links, ads, banners, possibly articles, other content and shared space that ‘extends’ your online presence beyond your site.
We’ll only touch on these briefly, but before you head offline, take a quick check to make sure you’ve got your online basics lined up first:
While this report is primarily about not only offsite but offline marketing of your Web properties, we believe strongly that offline methods will do you very little good if your “house is not in order” online first.
First review what you need to do on your own site.
• Is all of your content up to date?
• Do all of your internal and outgoing links work?
• If you have an e-commerce function is it working fully?
• If you had planned to do content or Search Engine Optimization, have you done it?
Good. We assume so. Now think for a minute about your online, but offsite avenues.
Off-Site Optimization Review With your own site up to snuff, you still need to be sure that...
• Your ad campaigns, banner placements and other clickable distributions are working, point to good pages, and so forth...
• Have you arranged for the link placements you planned for?
• Do all of your incoming/referrer links work?
• If you are using an RSS or other syndication strategy, is it functioning fully?
Getting Started the “Old-Fashioned” Way Whether the Web is more analogous to TV or reading, or to store experience or a catalog experience, are interesting questions – for another time.
