The Number One Enemy of Online Success!
| Category: PR/Publicity and Media | Date: 2002-07-19 |
Is it poor technology, is it weak marketing, maybe not having a great domain name or lack of funding? There are a large variety of factors that affect your success online and most of them allow you to adjust your site and business plan to deal with the problem. However there is one factor you have absolutely no control over!
At allaboutwebsites.com we are constantly surveying our clients and customers looking for insights into generating traffic and we have found the number one obstacle to be "human behavior". In other words its extremely hard to change peoples habits and no matter how much marketing you do and how much work you put into your site, you cant make people use it!
One of the best examples of this is the newspaper. I consider myself a netofile, yet every Sunday morning I look forward to going out of my house and picking up my newspaper from the driveway (I hate it in the winter, but still do it since I dont have a dog).
I also get to pay a $1.50 a week for this privilege. I do this knowing I can get the same newspaper online for FREE! Why would I do this? Habit.
Other examples of this are paying for cable services, using the yellow pages, postal code books, using the radio, buying CDs and many more, even though a lot of these services are available free online!
So if we find it so difficult to change human nature yet we want to reach out to these people, how do we do that? Well, the answer is for them to know youre there before they go online and they start the slow process of changing how they obtain their information. You need to be where they are looking. You need to be in the yellow pages, the local paper, window and vehicle signage, local sponsorship, charity support and more.
We presently use the following strategies to put our URLs in the consumers minds before they go online: our client who operates a call hop service into Toronto puts his calltoronto.com in his yellow page ad, while the majority of his clients still use the phone they are subconsciously having the URL logged into their brain and when they are ready they will start to use the web site as opposed to the phone, because they have already been exposed to it.
Another of our clients, sickofrenting.com, simply places a one line ad in the classified section of the local paper under For Rent, while another torontonewhomebuilders.com goes under New Homes (cost $10.00 per week).
Our client, century21excel.com, supplies all of their Realtors with reflective window decals for their vehicles (cost $20.00 each), having 40 people driving all over the region will build name recognition before the consumer goes to the site.
Another example is a local portal, allaboutdurham.com, who gives out free sites to local charities (i.e. allaboutdurham.com/thestationgallery), now the local charities are marketing their portal.
One last example is that I have managed to work my way on to dot.com TV shows and of course they cost me nothing yet I get free exposure and free clips that I can add to web sites i.e. fundlibrary.com (http://media.fundlibrary.com/RamFiles/investmenttv/gar101500r.ram).
Brand recognition is a long-term process and keeping that in mind some of your marketing energy should be spent on looking for inexpensive site recognition solutions so that even the person that says I will never go online will know your URL!!
This article is brought to you by courtesy and reprint permission of http://www.promotenewz as published by http://www.ientry.com
About the Author
Tony Slavin is the CEO of allaboutwebsites.com
tslavin@trebnet.com
http://www.allaboutwebsites.com
At allaboutwebsites.com we are constantly surveying our clients and customers looking for insights into generating traffic and we have found the number one obstacle to be "human behavior". In other words its extremely hard to change peoples habits and no matter how much marketing you do and how much work you put into your site, you cant make people use it!
One of the best examples of this is the newspaper. I consider myself a netofile, yet every Sunday morning I look forward to going out of my house and picking up my newspaper from the driveway (I hate it in the winter, but still do it since I dont have a dog).
I also get to pay a $1.50 a week for this privilege. I do this knowing I can get the same newspaper online for FREE! Why would I do this? Habit.
Other examples of this are paying for cable services, using the yellow pages, postal code books, using the radio, buying CDs and many more, even though a lot of these services are available free online!
So if we find it so difficult to change human nature yet we want to reach out to these people, how do we do that? Well, the answer is for them to know youre there before they go online and they start the slow process of changing how they obtain their information. You need to be where they are looking. You need to be in the yellow pages, the local paper, window and vehicle signage, local sponsorship, charity support and more.
We presently use the following strategies to put our URLs in the consumers minds before they go online: our client who operates a call hop service into Toronto puts his calltoronto.com in his yellow page ad, while the majority of his clients still use the phone they are subconsciously having the URL logged into their brain and when they are ready they will start to use the web site as opposed to the phone, because they have already been exposed to it.
Another of our clients, sickofrenting.com, simply places a one line ad in the classified section of the local paper under For Rent, while another torontonewhomebuilders.com goes under New Homes (cost $10.00 per week).
Our client, century21excel.com, supplies all of their Realtors with reflective window decals for their vehicles (cost $20.00 each), having 40 people driving all over the region will build name recognition before the consumer goes to the site.
Another example is a local portal, allaboutdurham.com, who gives out free sites to local charities (i.e. allaboutdurham.com/thestationgallery), now the local charities are marketing their portal.
One last example is that I have managed to work my way on to dot.com TV shows and of course they cost me nothing yet I get free exposure and free clips that I can add to web sites i.e. fundlibrary.com (http://media.fundlibrary.com/RamFiles/investmenttv/gar101500r.ram).
Brand recognition is a long-term process and keeping that in mind some of your marketing energy should be spent on looking for inexpensive site recognition solutions so that even the person that says I will never go online will know your URL!!
This article is brought to you by courtesy and reprint permission of http://www.promotenewz as published by http://www.ientry.com
About the Author
Tony Slavin is the CEO of allaboutwebsites.com
tslavin@trebnet.com
http://www.allaboutwebsites.com
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