Building word-of-mouth buzz is a secondary traffic-building technique. Depending on your situation, some of the strategies outlined in this chapter will work very well for you. Others will not.
Either way, wait to investigate secondary strategies until after your business has a solid foundation of quality content. In other words, until you have at least 50 quality content pages, your efforts are better utilized by focusing upon…
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… and building traffic from the major Search Engines. As far as “bang for the buck” goes, this approach yields a far better Return On Investment (ROI) for your time.
How do you build word-of-mouth buzz? First piece of advice, don’t bother with those “recommend-a-friend” scripts. Less than one visitor in a thousand fills them in. There’s a far simpler way to get “word of mouth.” Deliver great content.
Want an example? Let’s say that you have a wonderful theme-based site about succulent plants (i.e., cactus, euphorbia, etc.). You have a terrific page about all the tricks you have developed for propagating them.
Other aficionados find that page at the engines. Do you think they’ll tell friends, or forums, or cactus associations, about this terrific info? Sure they will. Just one more huge benefit of OVERdelivering! But one big warning…
Average content = near-zero world of mouth. After all, have you ever been excited by “average?”Great content is the only way to go!
Many Webmasters don’t bother with any word-of-mouth strategies, short of this one. That’s because creating great content is not only the best way to build buzz, it’s also the most efficient and yields the best ROI.
When the time is right, use the following techniques to seed word of mouth buzz, especially if you are selling your own product or professional service…• write articles for e-zines or article distribution sites
• make posts in forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, newsgroups (depending on your niche and situation, these can be fairly effective… or totally useless)
Forum postings can also be helpful for building up your site’s link popularity somewhat, provided they are closely related in topic to your site.
• publish your own blog, a Web log/diary (discussed in DAY 9)
• use a signature file (i.e., contact information, including your URL and preferably your VPP) in your daily e-mail correspondence.
Depending on your circumstances, some or all of the above techniques could be effective in seeing an increase in your word of mouth buzz…
Circumstance 1) The “nichier” your site, the better. If your site covers a topic already well-addressed by a zillion other sites, it will be much harder to stand out from the crowd and make an impression with your visitors.
Circumstance 3) Your content should be of outstanding value to targeted visitors.
If all three circumstances are present, then investigating “word of mouth” strategies makes sense. There’s no point in making a post or writing an article otherwise.
OK, suppose you’ve got a high-quality content-rich niche site that delivers outstanding content. You make a fantastic post at a relevant forum, including your conservative signature file. What happens next?
Forum visitors visit your site, tell their friends, put a link on their site to yours, and discuss your site at relevant forums and discussion groups. Talk about a homerun buzz!
A word of caution… Even the best forum posts won’t generate traffic like a properly optimized content page. Forum posts will yield a short-term blip of traffic until your post cycles off the main page of the discussion.
On the other hand, properly optimized KFCPs deliver traffic 24/7, 365 days a year. A forum post has a relatively short lifespan in comparison.
Now, before you proceed to DAY 8, please complete your DAY 7 Goal-of-theDAY, and take note of your Ongoing Goal...Next step? Paid Search Engine traffic…
