Nine Internet Marketing Guidelines

Key Internet Marketing Guidelines For the Web Site Owner

September 2003

Everyone who is considering doing business with your company is checking out your Web site - every single one. But most sites are ignored by their owners, left lingering full of "hot" news items from two years ago. Will you let your site grow old and start hurting your business instead of helping it? By paying the proper attention to your site, it will return the favor with dollars for your company's bank account. This guide contains some simple pointers to help all negligent Web site owners improve the profit-generating ability of their sites. The Internet is the biggest lead-generating machine ever, and you don't need a shopping cart site in order to have Internet-driven sales. Information is communicated, trust is gained, and relationships are built - all online - before you ever speak to or meet with that potential customer for the first time.

So here are nine guidelines to help you get started mending the broken relationship you have with your Web site.

1. You have two goals for your site: Drive Traffic and Convert Visitors. Driving traffic is an easy concept to understand. Conversion can be more subtle. If you sell gizmos on your site and someone buys one, that's a pretty obvious conversion. But conversion happens in stages. A visitor who spends twice as long on your site as the typical visitor represents a small conversion. You've got them interested and that's good. Getting visitors to give you their e-mail addresses is even better.

Action: Think of all activities related to the development, management, and marketing of your site with respect to Driving Traffic and Converting Visitors. Don't spend a lot of time and money on activities that don't help you make progress in one of those two areas.

2. If you don't change your site on a regular basis it becomes old and useless. Obvious maybe, but it must be said anyway because we all acknowledge it yet rarely do anything about it.

Action: Add at least one page to your site every month.

Action: Modify some of your home page content every month.

3. Content is king in the Web world. Search engines are out there scouring the Web for pages full of text. Guess what? If you want your site to be found at Yahoo! when someone types in "vintage felt art" then you better have a page on your site that actually is about vintage felt art. It's that simple. Sure, there is more that can be done to improve your search engine rankings. But this is where you must start.

Action: Combine Guideline #3 with #2 and start adding pages to your site that are focused on one single keyword phrase that you think is important to your business.

4. Links, links, and more links. You need to get people who own other Web sites to put a link to your site on one of their pages. These are called inbound links, and they offer two benefits. First, inbound links can be a source of new visitors. Second, inbound links will help your search engine rankings. Major search engines have followed the lead established by Google and examine how many sites link into yours, using the result as a kind of "popularity index." This can give your page an extra boost in the rankings.

Action: Spend 1 hour each month soliciting links from partners, suppliers, those in related businesses, etc. - from anywhere that it makes sense. Search for your competitors' sites and see who links to them. Make sure that you're getting links from quality sites.

5. Every page is a home page. Way too many sites are linked together assuming that a fixed path will be taken from the home page. The reality is that a search engine can bring a new visitor to any page in your site. Many of these pages don't provide clear calls to action, so new visitors leave quickly.

Action: Examine the interior pages of your Web site and define obvious related next steps for visitors to take. If the page is a news article, then put links just after it to other pages in the site that relate to the article topic. Make it clear where you want them to go next.

6. There's a wealth of hidden marketing data in your site, and it's in your Web server logs. These logs are unwieldy to read in their natural form, but there are lots of tools available to help you interpret the data (see Guideline #7).

Action: Talk to your hosting provider about getting regular copies of your Web logs burned to CDs. Even if you do nothing with them initially, they contain invaluable marketing data that can never be recreated. Then, if you need information about the historical activity on your site, you'll have it.

7. By analyzing Web logs using the proper tools, you can uncover the marketing data hidden there. You can find out how many visitors came to your site, what search engines they came from, what search phrases they used to find you, and what paths they took through your site. It's great stuff.

Action: Get some form of Web statistics reporting in place. Most hosting providers include this reporting in their hosting packages. If you're not sure, ask them about it. If they don't offer Web statistics, switch hosting companies.

8. Keeping in mind that there are different levels of conversion (see Guideline #1), most Web sites have one or two key actions that visitors can take when their level of interest is high (e.g., newsletter signup, contact form, or purchase in the case of commerce sites).

Action: Once a month, use your Web statistics tool (Guideline #7) to measure the most important conversion action on your site. For example, if filling out your contact form is that key conversion then look at the number of forms submitted (conversion actions) ( the number of visitors (traffic) for the month. Track this value from month to month so that you have data for at least one trend that tells you how well your site is (or isn't) doing.

9. Take corrective action.

Action: Experiment with changes to your site to improve its performance. Make the changes and measure the results. It's the only way to realize your site's dollar-generating potential.

Weidman Consulting can help you improve your Web site profitability.