Traffic Acquisition through PR and Blogging
by Joe Orlando, Director of Sales
09/06/2007
You've launched your company's brand new website. You've come out on the other side of one of your biggest projects lately. It wasn't as easy as you thought, was it? You wrote an RFP, selected a vendor, completed audience assessments, created your SWOT, developed key messages, and sat through too many conference calls and whiteboard sessions. But, the launch of a website does not signify the end of a process, it's the beginning of one - traffic acquisition.
Just because you've built it, doesn't mean they'll come. Hopefully, throughout the process you considered options for acquiring traffic. If not, now it's time to figure out how you are going to generate traffic to the new website. But not just any type of traffic, you want qualified traffic. Qualified traffic will react positively to the call-to-actions you spent so much time developing and become conversions.
The strategy I suggest to my clients is a mixture of Public Relations, Search Engine Optimization, and Paid Search Engine Marketing. These activities will increase your visibility in the market and drive qualified traffic to your website. In earlier Expert Forum articles we've tackled the subjects of SEO and Search Engine Marketing and other marketing tools like Landing Pages.
Show off your new site with an announcement. PR can be a very effective tool to get the word out about your new site. Also, the content in the area of your site called "News" doesn't have to be a one-way communication. Consider turning that content into an email newsletter. Regularly send it out to your customers, partners and prospects. Give them the ability to forward it to a friend. Also, there are great tools out there that manage email newsletters and communications. They can give fantastic insight into your audience preferences. You can see who opened your announcement or newsletter, what pages on your site they went to from it. How long they stayed on the page and whom they may have forwarded it to.
An effective Web 2.0 marketing tool is a blog. I consider a blog a form of Public Relations. Through social networking sites, blogging can be a great way to publish your views on subjects that you are passionate about. A blog is basically a personal diary on the web for people to read. A business blog is simply one person's viewpoint on subjects that are aligned within a specific industry or business. Your audience can sign-up and for the blog and be alerted every time content changes. This creates stickiness and drives visitors back to hear what's new.
Currently, most of the blogs on the web provide little commercial value. Anyone with a internet connection can now share their views on any subject with the world. But, that is changing. You will notice many of the big names are now providing blog content. Companies like Microsoft and GM are using blogs as tool to generate an informal dialog with their audience on specific subject matter. They aren't hard selling through these blogs but instead providing value though authoring relevant content on subjects that their audience cares about. Webpronews.com says, "Blogs are a goldmine of formerly hard to get insight from CEO's, marketing guru's and others who never used to have a public forum. These business leaders are utilizing the Internet to convey their personal thoughts on happenings in their industry and life. They are blogging for the same reasons they do public speaking, to build credibility for themselves and their company."
In summary, the mere existence of a superbly designed and built website does not constitute the end of your online marketing activities. Instead, traffic generation through PR and blogging activities are great ways to ensure that people visit your site and turn into measurable conversions.
