The Ultimate Web Promotion Tool?
When I started my online marketing experiment last month I spent a lot of time researching the best ways to promote the websites I was developing. My expectations were that I would create a website (www.ColossalTV.com), promote it through various channels like search engines, an Adwords campaign, link exchanges, comments on newsgroups and the like. Gradually the traffic would build and I would start getting clicks on my Adsense ads.
I anticipated that the search engines would take 4-6 weeks for their spiders to crawl my site. It’s not quite a month later and www.ColossalTV.com is in the search engines. It’s not well indexed yet, but the home page is there on both Google and Yahoo. It also shows up on an Alexa search, but without traffic or ranking data.
Now, I’ve owned the domain name for this website since 2000 and have never really done much with it. At the same time I started the marketing site I also loaded-up WordPress onto this server and decided to make it a catch-all place to write about my wide range of interests, experiences, and expertice. This was mostly intended as a place to start collecting those little bits of knowledge that I pass along to people every day so that someday in the future I could look back and see the raw materials for a book or seminar. But a funny thing happened.
This weblog is getting more traffic, more ad clicks, and higher prices per click than my project site. That caught me by surprise because I’m not advertising this site and the content topics are all over the map. It’s a very unfocussed place. But, the numbers don’t lie. What’s up?
After a little reflection I realized that the power of this weblog comes from features built into the WordPress code and the blogging concept itself. By default, every time I post an article, WordPress sends out a little announcement to the blogging world that I’ve posted something and it tells them what the topic of the post is. Through the power of RSS feeds, pinging and other technology, weblog directories are announcing the topic and title of my post to a world of people scouring the web for new blog postings on topics they’re interested in. I don’t even have to sort it all out or limit myself – the directories filter the content.
I’m not waiting for the blogsphere to come find me, they’re waiting for me to say something. Wow! It’s the ultimate web promotion tool!
So what does this mean? First, I’m planning on writing for this weblog a lot! Second, I’ll use every opportunity to connect to my projects and other websites through posts on the site. It’s my launchpad.
If I want people to find out about my other projects or sites, I will write about them here. It’s also a great place to have my ideas tested, because people can talk back. I’m planning to create an Ask the Go-To Guy form so people can tell me what they want me to write about.
If you write something interesting there is sure to be someone else on this planet who’d like to read it. When they find you, make sure and let them know about all of the other great projects your involved in. They just might turn into customers!
Happy Blogging,
The Go-To Guy
