Tips to build website traffic

"Going from the web of old of being an information source, the next step is really about getting into a conversation with your customers," Bullseye managing director, Jason Davey, says. "Our strategies revolve around advising clients about how to get into that conversation using web technologies.

"A client like Blackmores doesn't sell directly to customers online, but does communicate a lot to customers online. Rather than just providing product information, we become a hub for communities of interest."

One such strategy saw Blackmores build an online paintball game. "Blackmores wanted to get into conversation with young men," Davey says, “with the long-term goal of promoting its men's performance multivitamin. The paintball game allowed people to upload their own photos and compete with teams, ensuring multiple repeat visits to the site and what was close to a free advertising platform for the products.

"We're involving the brand in a discussion with the audience. It's not about the old spray and pray style advertising, it's much more about customer engagement.”

A similar strategy saw the launch of a site, Pregnancy Companion, aimed at expectant mothers. The site includes a weekly email service that offers an update on what happens during each week of a pregnancy. While the content for the site is relatively timeless, new audiences continually emerge as former site users pass on details to other pregnant friends.

For any such strategy, promotion is critical. "It's not a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality," Davey explains. "There must be some form of promotion, even if it's just including a link to your site in all your communications that go out. You must build a way of capturing customer details and have a good reason for them to give you their details. Consumers in 2008 know the value of their data. Put your customer cap on and think like a consumer. Identify who your audience is and think of what their topics of interest are."

Innovation is also crucial. "Don't copy what everyone else is doing," he says. "Think of something new."

Blog Power

For the Sydney Writers' Centre, which offers training courses in a range of writing-related subjects, building an online presence was a critical part of marketing its real-world offerings. Most of the organisation’s initial marketing was carried out online.

"When we first started in September 2005, we were invisible on Google in the natural search rankings," says founder Valerie Khoo. The centre's first attempts at a site were based on a pre-defined template, but Khoo quickly decided that spending time learning site maintenance skills would be worthwhile.

"We tried Google adwords and for the first year or so it was responsible for around 95 percent of our business," Khoo says. "Without Google adwords, we would not have been able to grow the business so quickly, and our business would not be what we are today without the technological tools we’ve come to rely on.

"At first, I had no idea whether adwords would be effective or not. But the beauty of adwords is that it is low cost so the risk is minimal. If it doesn't work, you've only lost a few dollars. And if it works, the return on investment is excellent. I also like the fact that you can control the dollar amount you want to spend each day by setting an upper limit so that your advertising expenses don't go out of control.

"It's been flexible in that we've been able to grow our AdWord campaigns as we’ve grown. When we develop a new course, it's only a matter of minutes before we can advertise it online.”

Maintaining search engine visibility requires constantly changing dynamic content. With a focus on the written word, developing a blog—an online diary or newspaper reporting on issues relating to writers and the business—was a fairly natural step for the centre to take. "To help this we added a blog, which has also proved to be a useful marketing tool," Khoo says. "Through this, we can also notify students of author talks, poetry nights, and writers groups in the area.

"It's not difficult to add new entries to the blog because, as we have gained a profile, we are now regularly sent interesting news and announcements from other writing-related organisations. We also include interviews with authors on our blog so it has become a great resource for that too."

The centre also developed an online newsletter, which now has more than 2,000 subscribers. "We ensure that the newsletter contains useful information, tips and competitions so that it's not just all about the courses."

Further expansion into the online medium is on the agenda. "We started offering online payment a few months ago and enrolments increased immediately," Khoo says. "We have since created online courses which are mainly delivered by audio programs that can be streamed or downloaded via a password-protected site."