Marketing Your New Public Safety Web Site

By: Philip L. Hayes
Chief Internet Officer
Vertical Villages, Inc.

Sticky And Viral Site Marketing Strategies Overview

There are many companies and organizations that are making it big on the Web. Most with surprisingly low marketing budgets, reaching unexpected heights in short time spans. Their secret? Viral marketing and sticky web sites.

Viral Marketing is the process of encouraging other users to promote your web site because you are GOOD! A sticky web site is one that encourages its users to come back time after time after time because of information and services it offers. A site that seldom changes is NOT sticky.

Nothing markets a site better, spreading it like wildfire, than having viral products, tools and services. And nothing makes a site more capable of generating traffic than sites that are sticky,

The great news is that your site can start becoming sticky and viral right away by employing a few simple tools.

14 Ways to Promote Your Web Site And Make It Sticky

1. Email To A Friend

On every page on your site, you should invite people to send that page to their friends. Most people will look at something their friends send them. The number one rule of making something viral is making it easy to spread. Make sure that each page has a clear link or icon that invites the user to send the page to a friend. When they click on it, they should be able to send simply by entering their name and their friend's email address - keep it simple. The only other bit of information you may want to ask them for is their friend's name for personalization purposes. To add such functionality to your site, you will need to download a free or low-cost script. There are plenty to choose from.

2. Free Products To Pass On

Offer something for free. Make sure that it's useful or extremely wanted; otherwise no one will really care about it. Ensure also that it's very easy for users to pass on these free products to their friends. Something you can quickly make is a screensaver and wallpaper, using software from www.download.com and some decent images.

3. Forums, Chat, & Community

Provide ways through which your site visitors can add content to your site and communicate with each other. Consider forums, chat, and possibly instant messaging services through AOL, Netscape or ICQ. One way to easily add this to your site is using http://www.everyone.net. An even better way is to host a forum using a CGI script.

4. Postcards

People love sending postcards. Buy yourself a postcard making CGI script and customize the cards with pictures and logos from your organization. The magic here is that if someone sends a friend a card from your site, that friend will almost always want to pick it up, and to do so they have to visit your site! Its a great way to get new users.

5. Newsletter

It's VERY important that your site have a newsletter (or mailing list). Newsletters work wonders for sites that use them well. Give an incentive and a reason for someone to join your newsletter. People are not willing to just hand over their email address with no idea what they will be getting in return. The newsletter should always carry relevant, useful content, nut just advertising. As long as it is useful, people will love it and pass it on to several friends. Again, remember to actively ask them to pass it on. If you don't ask them to pass it on, even if they are willing to do so, they may just forget or not even think about it. To start a newsletter, all you need is a mailing list server or CGI script. A great FREE tool is YahooGroups!

6. Free Email

Why not offer a free email account based on your domain. Every time someone sends email from them, a small signature goes out to the recipient with your URL and a short description, just like Hotmail. And whenever they check their email they have to visit your site. You can quickly set up for free as an email provider at www.everyone.net.

7. News And Articles

Your site should always have relevant and ever-new content. There are two great FREE news services that provide some help. iSyndicate's (www.isyndicate.com) or Moreover's (www.moreover.com) news link services. These push relevant news and articles to your site. Make sure you make the categories relevant your sites interests. For instance, technology news would most certainly not be appropriate for an EMS web site.

But better than these services, why not get members of your organization involved in writing weekly or monthly content. This truly makes a site sticky.

8. Link Away

Provide easy ways for other sites to link to you. Have a page that showcases a variety of different banners and other links that webmasters can place on their own sites. Offer the HTML for each of those links to make it easy for webmasters to copy and paste on their sites.

9. Recommend This Site

Other than an email-this-page and an affiliate program, one more thing you can do to get people to tell others about you is to add a recommend-this-site button. Most people will never click on it unless there is something in it for them, so offer them something free in exchange or a chance to win a prize. You can sign up free with Recommend-It (www.recommend-it.com). They will give you a neat button that tells your users to recommend your site in exchange for a chance to win $10,000 - and they supply the prize money!

10. Join and Participate in EMS Newsgroups, Mail Lists & BBS

Yahoo Groups
http://groups.yahoo.com/

· 911 Console (850+ members)
This is the ORIGINAL and BEST 911 dispatchers' discussion list! Share your experiences, thoughts and opinions with hundreds of other dispatchers from across the GLOBE! 'The Console' is strictly topic-related.   There is lots of discussion about policies, procedure, certifications, daily events and incidents, etc.   This is THE forum for fire, ambulance (EMS) and police dispatchers and calltakers!

· Paramedicine (387 members)
Paramedicine.com is an international website for paramedics.   This e-mail list is a way for members of the site to communicate by e-mail with each other about the site as well as topics relevant to paramedicine in general.   The conversation tends to be very free flowing and wide ranging.   Be prepared, if you sign up to this list you will be getting a LOT of mail!

Topica

Topica is an independent provider of turn-key solutions for email newsletter publishers, from multinational media companies to individuals publishing news about a hobby or interest.

· FIRE-L (1250+ members)
A great place on the internet to discuss all aspects of firefighting

11. Web Rings

Yahoo Web Rings
http://dir.webring.yahoo.com/rw

Web rings is a nice way for web sites of a particular interest to share web surfers. They can Increase traffic to your site in just a few quick steps.

12. Banner Exchanges

bCentral Banner Network

http://www.bcentral.com/services/bn/default.asp

The bCentral banner network has over 300,000 sites in 33 languages. Using this network will allow you to target your banner according to site categories. You can choose up to 5 categories that will show your banner. You can also reach your target market by showing your banner according to your site's language. They provide a login for access to your Control Center to find out how many visitors came to your site and to analyze the effectiveness of your advertising efforts.

MedBanner
http://www.medbanner.com/exchange/index.html

The MedBanner Network is a free banner advertising exchange serving over 600 medical related web sites. Using this exchange you can target your marketing to physicians, nurses or allied health practitioners and healthcare consumers. Their system allows you to keep competitors banners from showing on your site.

13. Register Your Site With Key Search Engines

The most popular way for web surfers to find information on the World Wide Web is through the use of search engines. By listing your site with the most popular ones, you are assuring that people can find you. These web sites are dedicated to providing a database of web sites and topics that can be found through the use of their search tools. Some are most definitely better than others.

Each of the search engines have their own rules on how to submit to them. At a minimum, you should make an effort to make sure your site is listed with most of the search engines that follow. This list is by no means comprehensive but can server as a starting point.

HINT: Avoid Submission services and software that claim they can get you listed higher than everybody else!

Major search sites

These are the top guys--the search engines used by most people.

· Alta Vista: www.altavista.com. A web and newsgroup search engine.

· Excite: www.excite.com. Search services include the Excite and WebCrawler brands.

· Lycos: www.lycos.com

· Yahoo: www.yahoo.com. A portal providing a category-based Web directory.

Meta search sites

These sites search the other search engines and compile a summary.

· Ask Jeeves: www.ask.com

· Dogpile: www.dogpile.com

· Google: www.google.com. Uses text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search.

· Metacrawler: www.metacrawler.com

Other search sites

These sites are used by many people, but are not the most popular. Some may be up-and-comers in this crowded field.

· About.com: http://www.about.com An extensive network of sites by subject specialists who write articles, host discussions, publish free email newsletters and provide personally-reviewed links for each topic.

· IWon.com: http://www.iwon.com. Users have a chance to win $$$ just for using this search tool.

· Open Directory Project: http://dmoz.org/

· Go: http://www.go.com/

· Goto: www.goto.com

· Hotbot: www.hotbot.com. Offers users a point-and-click interface, pulldown menus, and the ability to use plain English terminology for constructing searches.

· Webcrawler: www.webcrawler.com

· Search.com; www.search.com

14. List your site with popular industry links engines

Many of the industry leading web sites have their own links databases which fellow EMS professionals use to find industry related sites. List your organizations sites with these

· EMS Village: http://www.emsvillage.com/web_directory/

· Firehouse.com: http://www.firehouse.com/links/

· Merginet: http://merginet.com/

· Fire-EMS Network: http://www.fire-ems.net/firedept/

10 Ways Not to Promote Your Web Site

AVOID SPAM!!!!!!

This is the cardinal rule of Netiquette. Mass, unsolicited e-mail is never acceptable, anywhere, for any reason. There are hundreds of hustlers out there trying to sell you databases and software that you can use to spam, but don't believe their promises. Spamming will make enemies for you, not friends. It can also get you barred from large ISPs, crippling your traffic.

Skip the submission services.

Submit your site to 500 search engines for $19.95! Bad deal. There aren't 500, or even 100, search engines worth submitting to. The 19.95ers simply run your URL through an auto-submitter (like Selfpromotion.com or submitit.com), which you can do yourself for free. If you want a professional to submit your site, plan on spending a few hundred bucks at most, which should buy you a careful and thorough job. I myself currently offer a basic submission service for $350, and I admit that I'm a little pricey. Insist on receiving documentation of everything that's been done, including all e-mail autoresponses from the search engines.

Don't waste time on the obscure search engines of the Web.

Submit your site to the only the major search engines and directories. There are about 30 that are worth submitting to. Then seek out specialized directories that are appropriate for your site. Don't waste time with obscure search engines and links pages

Think carefully about your Yahoo submission.

Yahoo is by far the most important directory, and the hardest to get into. Submissions are reviewed by real editors, so follow the instructions to the letter, and really try to convince them that your site is a useful resource.

Never submit your site until it's open for business.

Test your site thoroughly, and make sure every section is complete before you begin submitting. Most surfers will never return to a URL where they found a dead link or an "under construction" sign.

Don't forget to integrate your URL into your organization.

It's amazing how many organizations spend the bucks to build a web site, then balk at printing new business cards to include the URL. Your web site URL should be on every piece of company media from letterheads to coffee. Some organizations have even included them on the sides of their ambulances and fire apparatus.

Don't mess with the promises of success.

There are a lot of sneaky tricks discussed in the various Web promotion newsgroups and mailing lists, that claim to improve your search engine rankings. Loading your page with invisible keywords, creating special "doorway" pages with magic dust on them, and secret programs (for $19.95) that "force-feed" your page to search engines. Don't fool with it. The search engines and directories wage an ongoing battle against those who would "beat the system," and they can and will bar you if they suspect you of "spamming" them. Do use META tags, keywords in titles and body text, and that sort of thing, but don't overdo it, and always follow the submission rules.

Don't put anything in your web site directory that you don't want the public to see.

Most of us have a few "test" pages, or perhaps pages of personal material, that we keep on our Web server, but that isn't meant to be seen by the public. Straight search engines like Excite and Altavista, however, will automatically "spider" and index every page on your site, unless you tell them not to. Create a text file called "robots.txt," and place it in your Web site's root directory (usually the "htdocs" directory). This file has a list of pages or directories that you want to keep the spiders out of, and it looks something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /test/
Disallow: /temporary/
Disallow: /templates/

This tells all visiting spiders not to fool with any of the 3 named directories. Note that the directory names must end with a "/".

Don't neglect to measure your traffic.

Some wise man said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Be sure to keep your server log files safe, and use the software tool of your choice to analyze them. Your ISP may offer one or more free tools for your use. Getstats is one popular free one. If you can shell out a few hundred bucks, high-powered traffic analysis packages like Hit List or Web Trends can really help you boost your traffic by telling you how many hits are coming from each search engine, and what keywords people are searching on to reach your site.

When you're finished, don't stop!

Site promotion is an ongoing process. Once you've made your submissions, check back a month later, and you'll find that some of them didn't take. Resubmit as necessary, but don't overdo it. Always be on the lookout for new sites that might be willing to give you a link, and for new (but legitimate and preferably free) promotion opportunities.