A few days ago I was speaking to friend of mine who is a DJ and makes a fair living playing at parties and other occassions. The topic fell to how he could generate more traffic to his web site, thereby improving business for himself.

What I said to him is nothing original - it’s been done numerous times but it hadn’t been done by him yet. He told me that he was getting some promotional t-shirts printed that would have his company logo emblazoned across the front. The obvious first step to advertise his web site would be to add the web site address under the logo. But what else could be done?

My idea is for him to give as many t-shirts away as possible at gigs and then create a buzz around a competition where people would send in photos of them wearing the t-shirt. These would be displayed on his web site and so traffic would increase as those photographed, and their friends, would visit. Every week or month he would pick the best photos and send them a one of a kind CD or MP3 compilation that he would have created. Even better, he could create a system allowing site visitors to vote for their favourite photos. This would get otherwise passive visitors to the site involved and keep them coming back again and again to check how their favourite was doing. Each visit would be an opportunity to sell his service and/or capture email addresses so he could begin cultivating a relationship with them for future business.

This in a way is what buzz marketing is all about; creating a must-have or must-see situation and allowing your very own potential customers to create the content that attracts them to your site in the first place.  Everyone’s happy!

The graphical internet has been around for almost 15 years now and almost from the beginnng business owners saw the opportunity presented to them to drive product sales higher using this new fantastic graphical environment that so many potential customers were ‘logging’ onto. However, for most small businesses the internet, and how it can help their bottom-line, is still fuzzy.

Many of the SMEs that come to me for a website or consultancy still only envision their product brochures on a web site, what’s known as brochureware. However your web site can be, and should be, so much more than that.

For a start, a product brochure is usually designed within certain limitations like size, number of colours, weight of paper etc. Ask any marketer how difficult it can be to get product benefits across to a reader when fighting for space with company branding and a call-to-action like a phone number.

A web site, on the other hand, has none of these limitations. It can be as big or small as required, sporting as many graphics and colours needed to support the sales message and numerous types of calls-to-action from ‘Buy now’ buttons for the immediate sale to ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ for long-term-relationship building. It can be static or dynamic, i.e. displaying content stored in an on line database, depending on the frequency of new content. It could have advertising thereby creating a new revenue channel for your business. Using smart search-engine-optimisation techniques, thousands of visitors can be driven to your product pages resulting in numerous sales.

This article only scratches the surface of how effective a web site can be to improve earnings for your business. Stay tuned as I look at 2 different web sites and how they could improve.

We’ve all seen the ‘Email to a friend’ link on different types of sites, be they blogs, news sites or shopping portals. However, just how effective is this marketing technique and how can it be leveraged to improve click-throughs and therefore generate greater traffic to your pages?

The popularity, and ease-of-use, of this technique speaks for itself. Adding just a bit of code under an article or product listing and the ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing takes off with visitors referring it to their friends and family.

What makes a visitor refer or recommend something they see on your site to a friend? By very definition, friends share similar interests and when a visitor sees something that appeals to them they’re more than likely to refer to someone else they know will be similarly interested.

The very decision to refer a product to a friend follows the same formula as that of making a decison to buy something - emotion followed by logic to validate the emotion felt.  The product must meet the visitor’s criteria on buying - price, need, exclusivity, fun. If all these criteria are met for the visitor, more than likely you’ll have a sale on your hands and a greater chance that they’ll refer it to their friends.

However, a good way to improve on the clickthrough rate is to introduce an element of fun and value for the visitor - make them an offer e.g. they get the product at 10% off if they refer it to 5 friends. With the sophisticated, and yet easy to implement, referral scripts out there this kind of offer is easy to track. Or maybe offer them discount vouchers for the next time they shop thereby increasing the probability that they’ll be back to your site for some further shopping. Another good way is to enter them into a draw for some concert tickets if they refer the product to 10 friends.

Now where did my ‘Email to a friend’  link go……?