Cashing in on a Rising Meme

Making money on the internet is, generally speaking, tied to the amount of traffic your site generates. In short, success is contingent upon your site being popular. We’ve already discussed how generating content, such as done through blogging, can increase the attention your site receives. Today we’ll discuss the importance of targeting your content to those topics that interest the masses. In short, by identifying memes pertinent to your target community, particularly those that are new and growing popularity, and producing meme-relevant content, you can increase the attention your site receives.

Ideas quickly trickle through the internet, particularly through community driven sites such as those found on forums, social news sites (ala Reddit and Digg) and widely read blogs. When a large enough subset of an online community latches onto an idea (i.e., the idea is popular), community members seek out and share online content relevant to the idea. Paying attention to community discussions, then, can lend clues about popular content topics which you can exploit for the purposes of acquiring web traffic.

Direct Marketing: You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto

Searching For a Definition of Direct Marketing

Principles of Marketing, an MBA textbook, says direct marketing “consists of direct connections with carefully targeted individuals to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships.” While that sounds reasonable enough, you might be surprised as I was, to learn that it is only one of many and sometimes contradictory definitions. Open another textbook and you will undoubtedly find a different definition!

Sometimes, direct marketing is defined in terms of the specific media or advertising mediums employed, while other times it is defined in terms of the location at which a transaction occurs. In the absence of specific methodologies and technologies employed, discussing the profession of direct marketing may be nebulous and ambiguous at best.

Content is Indeed King

On Monday we discussed how the discovery of your website by bloggers and social media services can bring about super spikes of traffic. We also recommended that anyone looking to leverage this phenomenon regularly produce content - the more content produced, the greater the odds that A-list bloggers will want discus your article, or so the theory goes. In this post, we will elaborate on the importance of content generation in terms of marketing your online business.

To be clear, the content doesn’t need to be a long, drawn out article. It can be a picture or a video, or just a quick note. But taking the time to produce something unique for people to appreciate can only bolster your existing marketing efforts.

Is Your Small Business Website Trustworthy?

On Trust and Credibility

Have you ever googled for a specific product or service, found exactly what you were looking for, but made the purchase from another site which seemed more trustworthy? I know I have. Sometimes I, for better or worse, simply didn’t find a site’s navigation clean and intuitive. Other times I wondered how my credit card information would be processed. Does the company store my credit card information and if so, is it encrypted and secure from employee theft?

In most cases, this assessment was quick and more reactionary then reflective. It either looks and feels right or it doesn’t. Building trust is critical to a small business that targets the long tail through search engine and other online marketing tactics. First impressions matter (hackneyed but true).

Word of Mouth Marketing, Blogging, and A Model for Web Traffic

Generalized Model for Web Traffic

Earlier this month, Europhysics Letters published a paper titled “A Theory of Web Traffic.” In it, the paper’s authors, Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, discuss a mathematical model they created to describe website activity. Their model is based upon the observation that traffic (pageview/visits) is not uniform, i.e. that steady traffic is typically interspersed with traffic super spikes.

Referrals from search engines, article directories, RSS feed subscriptions, and other relatively static sources account for the steady traffic seen between spikes. Traffic super spikes are created when a reader from one of the aforementioned static sources encounters an interesting page and posts it to a blog/forum/other location with greater visibility than your own site, triggering an “avalanche of blog and forum postings.” For those who follow the web startup space, this is very much the Techcrunch effect in action.

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