Do you know how many web sites today on Internet?
According to a survey completed by NetCraft in June 2010, the number is around 233,848,493. You will be surprised to see the chart below showing this number is growing so fast since around 2000.
Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - June 2010
However, less than 50% of them are active. Why?
Many web sites have been built for marketing purposes and many people already know Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But attracting traffic once is not the end. How to keep existing traffic and get new traffic constantly is the key to activate web sites. One of the important strategies is to publish new information regularly and frequently. Unfortunately, many web sites were built long time ago and left behind the evolution of web technology. Due to the limitations of old web sites, the owner of a web site has to ask a technical guy for help before the contents on a web page to be updated and published. There is a technical barrier for business people to publish marketing information timely and freely.
Maybe you will ask, how about blogs? Yes, this is a good idea. It is easy to create a new account on a web site such as www.blogger.com. The skills to edit Microsoft Word documents is enough to write blogs. The problem is the top domain is not yours, and the web site is not for you or your company only. In a social media, is it easy to make your published contents outstanding? If your valuable information spread around the Internet, and is not available on your own web site, those information may not bring traffic to your web site. Because visitors get answers and stop over there. Moreover, hyperlinks to external resources on your web site will drive your visitors away from your web site. Then, how to get backlinks from other web sites to your web site? To keep visitors staying longer on your web site is also important for marketing.
Current web technology enable web sites to interact with visitors. Before there are blogs, we have forums already. Why people need blogs ? If blogs are seminars, forums are convention centers, which hold many seminars. The significant difference between blogs and forums is blogs only allow writers to start threads, but forums allow all registered visitors to start threads. So, blogs are more helpful for marketing. Because a writer is the speaker, and all visitors are audiences. The writer can select topics that can attract audiences' attentions.
IT brings many opportunities to assist people to achieve their goals. Essentially, blogs and forums are Content Management Systems (CMS). A web site driven by a Content Management System is able to integrate web pages, blogs, forums, survey and more and more features, and facilitates the organization and release of dynamic contents. A menu including 'Sign In' item on every web page for content management, instead of for visitor navigation, is always the label to identify a CMS-driven web site. Centralized relevant contents will be greatly helpful and powerful for branding and marketing.
Don't leave your web site behind in marketing campaigns.