A person in a long trench coat, a fedora, dress shoes and red, mid-calf socks walks around Times Square. All of a sudden, women start gasping in disbelief, tires shriek and children point and laugh. The flasher has struck again! Then, in an instant, the flasher disappears into the shadows and people move on with their lives.
Discontent with the short-lived effect his random flashing had on citizens milling about in Time Square, the flasher comes up with a new plan to make a larger impression. Every day for six weeks, the flasher strolled through Times Square exposing himself to hapless onlookers. This garners the flasher national exposure on the major media networks and makes his exploits the talk of the town. Alas, within a short time, the public gets bored again and the flasher fades into obscurity.
The Problem With Gaining Exposure
Does this story sound familiar? If you have a website it very well may. The story of the flasher is not too dissimilar to that of generating a marketing buzz surrounding a new website. There is a certain amount of unexpected exposure that grabs people’s attention in a real quick way. Then, the next link on the page grabs the attention of the netizen and they are off to other attractions. In order to gain the attention of that netizen again, you often have to go to even more extreme measures to make sure they really remember you. This cycle continues ad infinitum.
Like the flasher that exposes himself in public, if you want to maximize the impact of your advertising efforts, you have to get out there and expose your website to the masses. However, like the flasher, a single shot at exposure is going to have minimal gratification. A short stint of exposure will garner you more traffic and will make you the talk of the town for a while, but again, time wins out and you are forgotten. The question now becomes, how to gain and maintain the attention of those who you are targeting.
Defining an Exposure Strategy
First of all, you have to have a strategy for gaining and maintaining the attention of your audience. Earlier today, Andy Beard published “10 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Sucks…“. While the title of that post is suggests that social media marketing is a negative thing, he goes on to say that how some people do social media marketing sucks. Andy’s post outlines ten factors that a person should consider before launching into a social media marketing campaign. The factors outlined in that article are not exclusive to social media marketing. They are applicable to website marketing in general.
If our flashing fiend were to apply such concepts to his exposure campaign, he might do some research on the demographic of who would be most shocked by his exposure, the times of the day when the most people in his target demographic are present, the duration and style of his exposure, survey responses from those who he exposed himself to, etc., etc..
While the flasher analogy may seem a bit absurd, it is not too dissimilar from the type of thinking you need to have to gain and maintain the attention of the masses. You have to continually ask yourself, how can I make what I have stand out? How can I continually make my presence known and keep my site on people’s lips.
Practical Application of Your Exposure Strategy
Once you have developed your strategy for gaining the attention of your target market, you then have to get out there and start exposing yourself… publicly! How you can do this is rather simple, and it doesn’t require a trench coat or red socks. However, gaining exposure is not an overnight process and does require an investment of your time. Major companies or wealthy individuals have the working capital to hire an expert to go out and gain them exposure. Smaller businesses or the average individual does not. Therefore, you have to be prepared to go out and do some self-exposure.
Some effective ways of exposing your site publicly include:
- Become active in communities that are related to your key market.
- Place a backlink to your site in your email signature, forum signatures, the website field in comments you leave, and anywhere else you can place it where it doesn’t come across as spammy.
- Seek out and partner with others who are in your vertical market and get their assistance in exposing your site in exchange for a product, service, or ad space.
- Provide methods for visitors to your site to tell others about either by “Link to Us” codes, an affiliate program, social bookmarking widgets, or a “Send to a Friend” form.
- Offer incentives to your members in exchange for a product, a service, or ad space for free.
- Join social networking services like MyBlogLog, Technorati, and BlogRush that help aggregate headlines from your site.
- Spinn, Digg, Stumble your own site. Be careful with this one! Do it sparingly and only do it if you would have done so anyways if the site was owned by someone else. Also, if you are going to do this, you should be sure you are investing the time to promote other people’s sites by Spinning, Digging, or Stumbling them; otherwise, your self promotion will be obvious and people will grow to ignore you.
Find a Corner – Ready, Set, Go!
The above methods are just starting points. Your target market will define what methods you use to gain exposure for your site. Regardless of whether you use the above methods, or not, the key point is to get out there and expose your site to the public. Unlike the flasher, there is usually very little legal risk in going out there and exposing your site in public as long as you are playing by the rules and you participate in other ways to add to the authority of what you promote.
You have read my two cents. Now have your say!
Do you believe engaging in strategic self-promotion? Why?
What techniques do you use to promote your site?
