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Subject:Re: How to promote a Web site? (Long) From:"Steve Schwarzman" <steve -at- writersbookmall -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sun, 28 Mar 2004 15:46:31 -0500
Before you consider how to promote your site - and certainly before you
plunk down hundreds of dollars to get premium placement - consider what you
are marketing in your site. If you are a one-person writing shop, then it's
not going to help you to engage in mass marketing. You've only got a fixed
number of hours to sell. Imagine that you got to the #1 position in every
search engine, and every Fortune 500 company came to your door. Are you
going to be able to sell your services to all of them?
It seems to me that the marketing raison-d'etre of a site for a solo
professional is not to gather in cold leads, but to take warm leads and
convert them into sales. Put your URL on your cards, your resumes, your
e-mails, etc. so that when people say, "Hmm, maybe this is the writer for
me?" they are warmly invited to get to know your work better (specialties,
experience, samples, location, etc.) at your site. Make those cold calls to
companies in your area that you want to sell to, and give them your URL so
they can check you out.
For this, you don't need premium placement, nor do you need any kind of high
ranking on general search terms. Devoting money and even time to chasing the
search engines just isn't the way to promote a tech writing business. Mass
marketing is generally for products, not services, unless you have a
national service business (like an auto body repair chain).
The only exception I can think of offhand would be if you have an incredibly
rare specialty; let's say, you're one of 20 people in the country who are
experts in a technology. Then the thing to do is create a good page on your
site with lots of juicy info on that specialty. Give it time, and you'll
start showing up when people search for that specific subject. If you want
to jumpstart it, you could buy some keywords on search engines that target
that highly specific specialty.
Steve Schwarzman
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