When was the Last Time You Referred a Website to a Friend?
It's strange. Most webmasters work extremely hard to promote
their websites on the Internet. You have probably worked day and
night optimizing your pages for the search engines. You have
probably spent countless amounts of money on Pay Per Click
advertising and Internet marketing consulting.
Yet in the end there are hardly any results. For some reason
nobody seems to care about your website.
Did you realize that most Internet marketers are probably
working backwards? It's like watching a home constructor try to
put up the walls before the foundation is even laid.
Ask yourself this one question: "When was the Last Time You
Referred a Website to a Friend?"
That may seem like an odd question, but think about in anyway.
Was it Google? Or perhaps HomeStarRunner.com? Or another website?
Now ask yourself why you referred those websites to your
friends. Back in the day when Google was starting to become
popular I didn't hear about it from a TV commercial or from a
newspaper ad. I heard about it from my friends.
In fact, if you think about it, most good websites that you know
of probably weren't found by searching for them. You probably
had a friend or colleague tell you about the website.
So what makes these websites so shareable? Why would you refer
these websites to others?
It is simply because of content.
So ask yourself this question: "Is your website shareable?"
There are several components of a website that makes it
shareable. I will list a few here.
1. Entertaining Content.
If your website has content that will make browsers laugh then
you probably have a shareable website. I don't think anybody
would mind coming across a website that was cleverly funny in
any way.
2. Useful Content.
Is your content useful? Or do you write articles just so that
you will have more pages for the search engines and for the
article directories? The truth is that most content on the
Internet is not even created for people! How can anybody expect
somebody to really want to stay at a website that was created
for a search engine spider?
3. Free Content.
A lot of webmasters are afraid to give any information away for
free. They think that any knowledge should be packaged up into
an e-book and sold. While there is nothing wrong with doing
this, you must be willing to openly give out free content.
Otherwise most people will not stick around in anticipation of
your next e-book.
4. Well-Formatted Content.
While having a well-designed website won't guarantee you
success, by having a slick design that makes your content
readable (or useable depending on your website) you will help
keep even more visitors. Choosing a blue background with yellow
text might not be the best idea if you have a lot of articles
for your visitors to read.
In the end you need to take a look at your website as if you
were a visitor and not a search engine. If you were to find your
website today without any prior knowledge of it, would you stick
around to read more? And better yet, would you refer it to a
friend?
If the answer is no, then you have some work to do...