Backdoor Marketing Success

When marketing our sites, most of us are eager to point users to the "front door" of our web-based residence (i.e., the ".com" part). After all, telling someone that we sell our products at "Soft9000.com" feels like we are giving them the our "street address" on the nation’s information super-highway.

Unfortunately, the reality is that most people are simply moving too fast down that highway to allow our front-door signs to persuade them to examine our wares. From our own personal experiences, we all know that when searching the net, the vast majority of us want to know what someone has, if it works for us, and then check-out the rest of his or her on-line presence.

Case in point: I have personally written five (5) software titles: A file-installer, job search, news search, quotation, and list-server program. When looking at these products as "my software," I only have one site to promote, (NauzNet.com). For years, that has been the only front-door I thought anyone would need. "Let the search engines do the rest," I thought.

However, as I recently began to look at my products and services individually, I discovered that there are many sites interested in promoting each of my products as a separate entity. Moreover, although very few of these sites were search-engines, many of them were well known throughout the web. Why not tailor-up some custom content geared to help users who frequent the more content-specialized sites?

For example, national, regional, and local job banks were interested in my Job*NET program (so I created jobnet.html), on-line traders and resume collectors panicked at the automation capabilities of News*NET trading robot (created newsnet.html), and software developers and executive users alike love exchanging large sets of files with EzInstall (ezinstall.html). Finally, with so much being said in InternetDay on retaining site visitors and ezines, I wrote a list server and created our free "Quote Of The Day" service (which, I have discovered, appeals to just about everyone).

After tossing in my consulting experience (consulting.html), I began to look for places where people might be looking for my "new" products. The results have been amazing! I have been pleased to discover that, rather than staring at a single "front door" to my financial future, any site could easily be re-designed to have many more interesting entry-points than I had ever imagined! It’s only a matter of how many ways we can devise to package what we do, as well as how hard we work to let people searching for our types of services find us where they expect us to be. This means a lot more than simply "using search engines." It means thinking like a customer who is probably searching for your product or service right now. We must learn to use the resources commonly available to them to help us find other places where usage-specific introductions to ourselves need to be. It’s a matter of intelligent packaging.

Of course, marketing many "back doors" on your site is a lot more difficult than marketing a single ".com" (in our case, over seven times more difficult)! However, when tallying the hits to our web-site, I am ever amazed to see how much traffic is coming to us through the new doors that we have been working to open up to our site: I am discovering that, in the final analysis, it's the knocks at these other doors that are generating the lion’s share of our sales traffic. Indeed, for every caller at "index.html" (any site’s primary entrance), our "ezinstall.html" door (our best selling product) is now getting well over 500 visits. This is an example of successfully generating sales through a well-publicized back-door! (*)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the process of packaging your web-site up into many targeted, stand-alone, products-pages can also help you determine what you should be working on next. For example, having written for Byte and other trade magazines, I decided to include my articles from those magazines at my main site. Why the extra effort? In my case, providing free information helps with a product I sell. People who like to learn will eventually want to be paid what they are worth by up-grading their employment (Job*NET). By putting free articles and tutorials on-line, you can also get a lot of search-engine "magnetism." This magnetism, of course, invites even more people to come to your site for your free information.

What’s next? We are planning to put some source code on-line to provide a back-door for software developers to enter (each one a potential EzInstall customer). Through it all, as they come-in through our back-doors, our InternetDay-inspired "Quote For Today" service is at the top of every page. Prominently displayed, our list-server is the "guest book" that everyone wants to sign. Of course, by having visitors and patrons sign-up for this free, daily service, we are better able to keep visitors to our site in remembrance of "that company with the funny Hungarian name!"

(*) Some words of caution here: Once you have your sub-web-pages cross linked to other places, be careful not to change the names of, or otherwise remove, the files from your site. You can destroy a lot of work by removing a page that many others have linked to. For this reason, it is often best to choose meaningful names as you set-up or re-organize your web-site. Choosing meaningful names has two advantages; First, meaningful names allow you to remember them when telling other sites about your "doors." Second, meaningful names make web-page maintenance have an "eternal" quality. For example, is it easier to remember "http://www.soft9000.com/ezinstall.html" (all the same case), or "../Page02b1197.htm"? Which of these two names would mean more to a prospective user, as well as be less prone to data-entry problems by others?

If you DO need to change the name of a highly-publicized web-page, make sure to upload the new versions of that page to BOTH the old and new location (this strategy is valuable even if you are relying solely upon the search-engines to tout your wares). In short, by keeping the contents of obsolete web-pages up-to-date, you can insure that people won’t get left-out of the important reason(s) that made the name change(s) necessary in the first place.

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